To Calais, In Ordinary Time

by James Meek

  ‘And miss the show tomorrow?’ said Cockle.

  ‘They’re to set a castle on fire,’ said Matt. ‘They’re to show a tale, with players and songs.’

  ‘So which is it, cock or hen?’ asked the knave with the sticks.

  ‘He’s a thrall,’ said Cockle.

  ‘She’s a maid,’ said Will.

  ‘I would it were a maid,’ said the knave. He hurled the first stick at Madlen. It struck her on the nose. Blood streamed of her nostrils.

  Two long fellows in dear black kirtles, with swords hung of their belts, shoff into the ring of folk and asked highly who answered for the stir.

  The knave let fall his two sticks and stepped away. Cockle said he’d caught a thief who’d gone about the joust clothed as a maid.

  There wasn’t no sound but the snot and blood that burbled in Madlen’s nose as she sniffed. The longer of the two fellows, with a hawk’s nose and cold dark eyes, came up to Madlen and proked her in the side with the toe of his boot. He turned to Cockle and asked who gave him leave to take money of folk to pelt a thief with sticks in this stead.

  Cockle went to a bundle and took of it the lady Bernadine’s wedding gown. He shook it out and said it’d been stolen of his lord in Cotswold by this thrall, a swineherd. Five pound Sir Guy had paid for it, but it wasn’t worth five pound now, spoiled of this gnof who’d worn it on the road.

  The hawkish fellow dight his hands on his hips and turned to Will. ‘And who are you, in the livery of the pageant?’ he said.

  Before Will could answer, Cockle said Will was a low bondman of his town who’d gone to be a bowman, and he’d always been homely with the thief.

  ‘I ne asked you,’ said the hawkish fellow to Cockle, in so fell a steven that most of the folk who nad left crope away.

  Will said he was sworn to Hayne Attenoke’s score, and the joust needed one who could shoot true. Today he was a bowman, and on Sunday he would be a bowman, but tomorrow, he would be Venus.

  Cockle bade the hawkish fellow mark how Will made himself out to be a man named Vaynous, which he wasn’t nowise in truth.

  ‘It ne recks me how you handle the thief,’ said the hawkish fellow to Cockle, ‘but take you silver of folk here again, gobbets of you will fatten my swine. As for you, Venus, while you wear that livery, you ne stray from the players’ tent.’

  He led Will away. Will looked over his shoulder at Madlen. She ran the back of her hand over her neb, smearing blood over one cheek. She met his eyes and shook her head.

  ‘Forget me,’ she said.

  ‘Shut your mouth,’ said Cockle. He kicked her in the ribs and when she lay on the ground kicked her again in the head. He called to Will to ask if Will had seen the lady Bernadine. Will ne answered, and followed the fellows in black to the gate.

  WHAT, JUDITH, IS the significance of my indulgent confession that I desired to be desired by you, carnally as well as spiritually? More profound than that transient libidinousness was an infantile urge for security, to have a love undeserved and unconditional, without expectation I would offer the same in return.

  NEXT MORNING THE nobles went to the chase. They returned at noon to the jousting place to rest and change. While they had their sport, the personages of the pageant rehearsed their roles. After noon the trumpets sounded, the noble audience assembled on benches and the common people sat on the heights surveying the enclosed pasture. The grand black tent was extended at the front and a company took position there. The difference between the brilliant daylight and the obscurity at the entrance rendered it difficult for those outside to perceive the faces or apparel of these people, yet ne prevented the nobles and their entourage thus obscured from enjoying a fine view of the spectacle. The exception to the privity of those at the tent entrance was Maestro Pavone, who stood in advance of the company. His blue shirt trapped the light. A large trumpet capable of multiplying his voice was mounted on a gantry close to him.

  The music ceased. A figure lay solitary in the pasture.

  ‘In my twentieth year,’ came the voice of Pavone, ‘when Love claims his tribute of young men, I went to sleep as usual one night, and dreamed a beauteous and pleasing dream.’

  The Lover, portrayed by Laurence Haket, lifted himself of the pasture and stood with his hands over his eyes. He removed his hands and marvelled at the scene.

  Pavone’s proclamations and the performers’ enactments were aided by a choir on the stage, until the audience ceased to tell the elements apart, and even the common multitude, for whom the high language of the narrative, with its abundance of French novelties, was largely incomprehensible, fell under the enchantment of the story.

  The Lover approaches the border of the Garden of Love. He enters, and after consorting with Love and his circle, passes on to the font of Narcissus (represented by a white fountain flowing into a round white vessel). The Lover regards the crystals that lie below the surface of the water and, through their special properties, perceives the presence in the garden of an arbour of roses. Among the roses is one bud about to flower that surpasses all others in perfection. Through the power of the font, the Lover is enamoured of it.

  (Concealed cords were employed to force paintures of roses upright. A grand veil, painted to resemble the pastoral verdure, was removed, revealing a statue of a rosebud in the centre of the arbour, the profound scarlet of the issuing flower visible through a fissure in the green that closely enveloped it.)

  The Lover approaches the rosebud and attempts to touch it but is prevented by thorns (spines pushed out of the base on which it rested). The Lover sighs and complains that his heart is heavy. (He raised an archery butt in the form of a painted heart, as large as he.)

  During the Lover’s tribulations, Love (portrayed by Madog ap Ithel, a Welsh archer) advances on the Lover from the rear. He stands couched like a hunter, an arrow primed. (Some in the audience cried out to the Lover to have regard to his heart, for it was in danger, and the heart was so large that it entirely blocked the Lover’s vision, rendering it impossible for him to perceive Love’s menacing posture. Love wore a long white robe and two great white feathered wings and had a crown of roses in his flowing black hair.) Love launches four arrows, representing the Rose’s qualities: Beauty, Simplicity, Courtesy and Company (apparently very war arrows, with trenchant steel points). Each arrow pierces the Lover’s heart, and with each arrow, the heart (held upright by the Lover) trembles, and he cries out piteously. (The audience ne knew whether to admire Love’s dexterity, or to fear that one of his arrows had really pierced the young man.) The Lover appears of his damaged heart and, standing close to it, complains of the pain. At this, Love launches a fifth arrow, Beau-Semblant, into the Lover’s heart.

  The Lover cries out that the point of the fifth arrow causes him great pain, but that it carries an ointment which relieves his suffering. (He laid the heart flat on the pasture and bent over the arrows in such manner that the audience might not see, then stood. In his hand was a red heart of a natural size, with five small arrows in it.) He declares that the beauty, simplicity, courtesy and company of the Rose is torment, when he mightn’t possess her; but her beau-semblance renders his heart light again.

  Love approaches the Lover and the Lover prays that he be permitted to enter Love’s service.

  ‘I ne let no villain nor swineherd kiss my mouth, but only the courteous, the noble and the frank,’ says Love.

  ‘I promise you,’ says the Lover, ‘these qualities are proper to me.’ He surrenders himself to Love, and Love locks his heart with a golden key.

  Love cautions the Lover that to regard the object of his affection from a distance, in the absence of the power to possess her, would be as if to fry his heart in grease.

  ‘Indeed, I ne comprehend how even a man of iron may survive such infernal pain,’ says the Lover.

  ‘Hope is your salvation,’ says Love.

  COSTUMED IN THE tunic, hose, belt and knife of a young man, Berna attended in the players’ tent her summons to take p
art. She stood apart from, and unobserved by, a company of Laurence’s fellows, similarly resting prior to engagement in the play. They ridiculed Laurence’s gestures and amused themselves with mocking phrases Berna strained to hear.

  ‘Around the garden Laurence goes …’ said one.

  ‘Like to he longs to pluck the Rose,’ said another, seizing an imaginary person in the air before him and violently pushing his hips outwards.

  ‘While secretly this gallant lover …’ They all snorted now with the effort of suppressing their titters.

  ‘Longs to pluck the sovereign’s mother!’

  Their verse so delighted and horrified them that they began at once to laugh in the most overt manner, to battle for respiration, and to ensure they weren’t spied on; at which juncture they discovered Berna, were forced into surprised silence, then turned away from her and erupted in renewed derision.

  ‘Bel Accueil!’ called the entrancer. ‘Warm Welcome, au champ!’ And Berna was obliged without delay to quit the tent and enter the domain of play.

  THE PLAYERS’ TELD was pitched near the garden. Two benches were set before it for the players to bide their times. Mad came of his play with Laurence Haket. He went by Lady Bernadine as she walked out onto the field, folded his wings and sat on a bench next to Will, who was clothed as Venus in a red gown and a copper crown. Like Mad, Will wore mighty wings, plump with white goose feathers.

  Sweetmouth came up to them clothed as an old woman. His girth was broadened with straw stuffed in his gown and he had much false tits.

  ‘My friends Love and Venus,’ he said, ‘ready yourselves for the best deal of play yet wrought in England.’ He wagged his tongue at them, up and down and side to side. ‘I’d get right near the maids who sit and behold our show. Let them know there’s a player has the tool to lick the honey from their cunnies till they die of mirth.’

  ‘Danger! Evil Tongue! Shame! Fear!’ cried a knave. ‘Go out to your steads and places!’

  ‘The hour has come,’ said Sweetmouth. He hitched up his belly of straw and ran out to Love’s garden with his hand in the air, smiling at the folk who beheld the play. When the name of Evil Tongue sounded from Pavone’s horn, folk hooted and whistled, and Sweetmouth wagged his tongue at everyone. He and the others went to hide in the garden.

  ‘You ne wished our friend good hap,’ said Mad to Will. ‘You’re down in the briars. Found you your friends from home, the swineherd and his sister?’

  Will shook his head.

  ‘This romance ne likes you,’ said Mad, nodding at the garden, where Warm Welcome beckoned the Lover a little nearer to the Rose.

  ‘Thomas would teach me what romance was, but I ne understood,’ said Will.

  ‘A love tale,’ said Mad.

  ‘I know them. A king’s daughter weds another king’s son.’

  ‘A romance isn’t no tale of no wedding, but of the hard times on the road to one. As, when there’s to be a wedding, and the bride or groom dies. Or the bride is stolen, and the other goes to seek her, or dies of sorrow. Or when they choose to wed against their elders, for love.’

  ‘And starve without land.’

  ‘Or when there can’t never be no wedding.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Maybe they aren’t man and woman, but two men who are friends.’

  Will plucked with his fingers at a stave wound about with red and yellow cloth that tokened Venus’s blaze. He asked Mad: ‘What’s your shift?’

  ‘I’m Love,’ said Mad. He lifted his bow. ‘I shoot the arrows to make the Lover sicken that he mayn’t turn away of the woman, whatever his will and wit should tell him.’

  ‘You talk like to the doctor of the pest in the Malmesbury sickhouse. What’s on the arrows?’

  ‘Beauty, Simplicity, Courtesy, Company and Beau-Semblant,’ said Mad.

  Will shook his head. ‘That’s all French to me,’ he said.

  Mad felt Will’s forehead with the back of his hand. ‘No heat there,’ he said. ‘Some other sickness has shifted your mood for the worse. Penny to a pound says you know those arrows through their smart if not their name.’

  ‘Who am I?’

  ‘You’re Venus. Yours is another arrow. It tokens the overspill of yearning of one to fuck, and of another to be fucked. Yours it is that tinds the fire.’

  Out in the garden, Lover went down on his knees to Warm Welcome and begged permission to kiss the Rose.

  BERNA REGARDED THE kneeling Laurence. She was accustomed in their encounters to be the lower of the parties. From this angle the light made gentle the firm and exact lines of his visage.

  ‘Is it your intention to dishonour me?’ she demanded.

  ‘We aren’t compelled to invent no speech,’ said Laurence disdainously. ‘Pavone and the choir narrate the story for us. The audience mayn’t hear you.’

  ‘My question ne comes of playing no part,’ said Berna. ‘I speak as Bernadine.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Berna, I advised you not to come here. I’d carry you to France and marry you, but the choice of moment must be mine, not yours.’

  ‘And what informs your choice, apart from your native vileness? Why not marry me yesterday, in the moment of my arrivage, and commence the journey to France? What is it, precisely, that moved you to delay, exposing me to the ridicule of a grand and noble dame? Why are you content to have Elizabeth Clare, the king’s very cousin, regard me as you do, as second prize to whatever you aspire to win from this pretence of French amorousness in a Wiltshire field?’

  ‘Berna …’

  ‘Might your petty young gentle-friends be correct? Might you be so simple as to imagine that Isabella, the king’s mother, a pious old widow attempting to amend the errors of her youth in placid retirement, will see you gallanting about in her revels and make of you some kind of favourite?’

  ‘Berna, you ne comprehend how valuable to us the brief interest of so potent a figure as—’

  ‘Oh! He confesses! Odious man! It was barely in your power to seduce a peasant, and now you tilt at a queen!’

  ‘For God’s sake, play your part.’ Laurence tensed for a fresh assault from Berna, but her face had changed; in place of rage was a serene anticipation. There was an alteration in the noise of the audience too. Out of the murmur issued cries of alarm. The choir was silenced. Pavone’s voice could be perceived repeating ‘En garde! En garde!’

  ‘What is it?’ said Laurence. Berna moved away from him rapidly.

  Laurence turned. A vast boar charged at him. Enker’s head was down, his tusks rampant, his eyes black points of the purest hate.

  LAURENCE STOOD AND recoiled smartly out of Enker’s course. But in evading the furious beast, he lost his balance and tumbled onto his face. Enker completed a circle and confronted him, preparing to charge again, his right hoof grating the earth. The young man was at his mercy.

  With a courage that caused the audience to issue an audible collective aspiration, Berna ambled forward, putting herself between the vicious animal and his intended victim. She placed her hand on the beast’s shoulder, calling him by name. Enker looked up at her, immediately abandoned his savage demean, frot her leg with his nose and commenced to forage peacably under one of Love’s hedges.

  Laughter came of the slopes. Pavone’s confused hesitations were interrupted by the voice of Dame Elizabeth.

  ‘At that moment,’ came her words from Pavone’s trumpet, ‘the Lover attempted to counter a sudden attack by the Boar of Capricious Desire. The Lover failed to defend himself successfully, and his dignity was grievously injured; but Warm Welcome saved him from destruction, proving her concern for the Lover had more power over him than his own swinish desires.’

  (Pavone and the choir hastily resumed the narrative.) The Lover stands and bows to Warm Welcome. Venus arrives and raises her torch over them, signalling the dissolution of Warm Welcome’s resistance to the Lover’s request to kiss the Rose. (Venus guided the Swine of Capricious Desire from the Garden of Love with a gentle touch of
her hand to the beast’s backside.)

  IN RESPONSE TO the Lover’s kiss, Jealousy enters the garden. Enraged by the presumption of the Lover, she rallies Fear, Shame, Evil Tongue and Danger, and builds a castle to imprison the Rose and Warm Welcome. (A host of labourers, employing cords, cables, poles and painted canvas, mounted a fortress on the pasture, with four walls, four ports and a tower at each corner.) In the centre of the castle rises a single high tower where the Rose and Warm Welcome are placed in captivity.

  At this moment of the Lover’s despair, Love returns and musters his barons to lay siege to the fortress. The army of Love assembles on the pasture: Lady Idleness, Nobility of Heart, Pity, Largesse, Courage, Honour, Delight, Joy, Humility, Patience, Discretion and numerous others.

  A group of Love’s more sinister accomplices approach the port guarded by Evil Tongue, cut out the offending organ and murder him. Love’s army charges in through the breach and commences a general combat with the defenders. Though Fear, Shame and Danger are greatly outnumbered, they battle ferociously, and it appears Love’s cause is lost. Love calls a truce and sends for his mother, Venus.

  The Engineer (a master who constructed the engines used by the English at the siege of Calais) arrives and advises Love to bombard the fortress. Love breaks the truce and uses a catapault to unleash promises, represented by garlands of flowers, at the fortifications. The defenders respond with a barrage of refusals, represented by chaplets of nettles, brambles and gorse.

  Venus enters. She vows she will die rather than permit chastity a safe place in any female heart. The barons of Love’s army adopt the vow as their own. Finally the priest Genius, Nature’s confessor, arrives with a message of his mistress. He explains that Nature labours ceaselessly to replace humans more rapidly than Death can devour them. All must employ the tools Nature has provided for the purpose of procreation; and when Love fails, the arms of Venus may succeed.