‘Never seen you before, master?’ he says. His gaze travels over the mule, to Katherine, to Thomas, then back to the pardoner.
‘I am Robert Daud,’ the pardoner says. ‘A merchant, of Lincoln.’
The man tips his chin and stares down his broad nose.
‘Take your hood off.’
There is a moment of silence. The pardoner looks very old. He begins fiddling at the ties below his chin. His fingers are trembling. But then the mule lifts its tail and shits. A man with a sack of beets on his shoulder cheerfully sets them aside to gather the steaming lumps.
‘Hands haven’t been this warm since Martinmas,’ he calls, and gets his laugh. Someone behind shouts and all around them people urge the Captain of the Watch to get on with it, and just then the pardoner discovers the knot is tighter than he thought, and at last the captain shrugs as if in the end he could hardly care less. He gestures at the mule and rolls his finger in a circle for another coin.
‘Pontage,’ he says. ‘Another penny to cross the bridge with a mule.’
The pardoner cheerfully digs in the pouch on his belt and produces the coin. The crowd surge forward. When they’ve turned a corner, the old man slumps against a wall and runs his fingers under the band of his hood.
‘Thanks to the blessed St James for that,’ he breathes.
When he is recovered he leads them along the narrow street to the marketplace, where the ground underfoot is cobbled and houses of every shape and size tower above them, each with glazed windows, and at one end is an edifice of ash poles and scaffolding indicating that something grand is being built.
But it is the business of the people that startles Katherine most. She has never seen so many men and women or children gathered together at once, and they are all shouting. Traders proclaim the value and virtue of their wares while rivals bellow disparagement, and money is changing hands, and everyone seems to be arguing with good-natured passion. In the middle of it all is a bear, a creature at once both human and alien, sitting glumly while a man nearby eats a pie.
‘We must eat something before we go about our business,’ the pardoner is saying, tying up the mule to a rail and handing a boy a coin to tend it. He leads them down a covered street to a cookshop where he buys them each a bowl of pottage, dark stuff, much tastier than Katherine can believe, reinforced with bacon and strips of yellowing kale. Then comes a loaf of dense brown bread still warm from the oven as well as an earthenware plate on which three pasties are actually greasy with butter. The cook’s wife hands them mugs of ale and they eat and drink sitting on the step with their backs against the shop’s wall. After they’ve finished the pardoner buys each of them a baked apple with wrinkled skin, too hot to hold.
‘You were hungry,’ the cookshop owner says. He is foursquare with short legs and sly eyes. His woman stares at them from the darkness of the kitchen.
Fabas indulcet fames,’ the pardoner replies, half turning. ‘We have had a long voyage, goodman, from foreign shores, much delayed by wild weather. Now that we are replete, we are bound for the fripperer and then the shoe-maker.’
‘And the barber too, I hope,’ the man says, nodding at Thomas’s tonsure. ‘There are plenty in town’d turn you in for the way you look.’
‘Quite so,’ the pardoner allows, swallowing the rest of his ale. He pays the man and hurries them on their way.
Katherine feels sick.
‘We must find our vessel,’ the pardoner announces, though this is news to her. ‘It won’t be long before the friars get about and they’ll know you’ve left your priory. First though: some clothes.’
They find the fripperer beyond the tailors’ stalls on the far side of the market, next to a man dealing in horsehides and urine. He is seated on the ground with his legs crossed, surrounded by a shin-high pile of rags of every kind of colour and cloth. He is working on some stitching, but when he sees the pardoner looming into view, he throws aside the work and is on his feet.
‘Master,’ he says, ‘may God make you prosper.’
With quick eyes he grades the value of their clothes, deducting from the total the price of every tear and abrasion, and though he is pleased at the thought of the money a man like the pardoner might possess, he grimaces when he sees Thomas and Katherine’s cassocks. The pardoner explains what he wants and the clothes-mender begins casting uncertainly through his stock, looking for something that might do.
‘I cannot furnish this chit with anything at the present,’ he says, indicating Katherine. ‘Women tend to their own clothes, see, or if they do leave me a garment, they come by to collect it. They don’t seem to get caught up in other things, as men do, or get themselves killed so often.’
‘I am not interested in anything for the girl,’ the pardoner tells him airily. ‘She can take her chances. I need clothing for him, and for my other servant. A lad smaller than this one.’
‘Much easier, that,’ the fripperer says and he begins pulling garments from different piles again, holding them up and then discarding them. Eventually he hands Thomas two piles.
‘Should sort you out,’ he says.
The pardoner pays the man and they retreat to an alley behind the marketplace.
‘You can change here,’ he says, dividing up the piles of clothing. ‘And mind where you step.’
The smell in the alley is powerful, and at its end they each turn a different corner and begin to try to make sense of their new clothes. For Katherine it is a strange experience. She needs to hold them up first, to see what they are. Then she pulls on the linen braies, followed by the woven hose. She rolls them over at the top and ties them off around her waist. Then she quickly takes off her cassock, and plunges her naked arms into the undershirt. It is rose-coloured, faded in parts, mossy at the pits and slick with wear. Then comes the tunic, russet-coloured as most men wear, then the coat, green and quilted, but worn and smelling of horses. Down its front on one side is a row of rough horn discs with which she is not familiar, and down the other stitched slits that mystify her. The garment gapes over her bosom and feels wrong. She’s spent her life in a cassock that hangs from her shoulders and these new clothes grip her body in unfamiliar places. Still, she is able to move more freely unhampered by the heavy skirts, and so long as she does not get her feet wet, she imagines she will be warm.
She meets Thomas in the alleyway and they stare at one another for a moment. His jacket is blue and his hose green on one leg, red on the other. His tunic strains where he had done up the buttons on the front. When Katherine sees this, she understands what the bone discs on her own jacket are for and she clumsily presses them home.
‘These are men’s clothes,’ she says.
Thomas nods.
‘It is safer,’ he says. ‘They will be looking for a canon and a sister.’
She nods. Unsure. He too looks askance.
‘Why is he doing this?’ she asks, pulling on the felt cap she’s been given. ‘He has no need to show us such kindness.’
‘It is a penance, I think,’ Thomas says. ‘If he helps us, things will go well for him in France. And if he hopes to benefit from it, then we may take these favours in good conscience, surely?’
She sees he too is in need of persuasion.
‘We would have had to take them from someone, at any rate,’ Katherine says, ‘or we would be dead.’
It is a hard point, and Thomas is silenced.
‘Look,’ he says. ‘I took these from Riven. You should have them.’
He proffers her Alice’s rosary beads. She does not take them for a moment.
‘I did not even know her,’ he says, pressing them on her.
Katherine does not want to gain from Alice’s death, but she takes them, puts them over her head and tucks them into her shirt. For a moment they are cold against her skin.
When the pardoner sees them he laughs.
‘Not perfect,’ he says, ‘but what is perfect?’
He is holding two pairs of brown leather boots. They slide
them on and stand in them. She stares down at herself. She can hardly believe what she sees.
‘Good God!’ Thomas says. He is wriggling his toes and smiling broadly. She smiles too. The pleasure is almost too much to bear. Warmth begins to thaw her feet and though the boots are too long, so that they smack the cobbles as she walks, they are not half so bad as the clogs she is used to, not half so bad as going with one foot bare.
‘Thank you, master,’ she says. ‘Thank you for all your kindness.’
‘It is nothing more than my duty as a Christian soul,’ the pardoner replies, ‘but perhaps we had better not linger.’
Two friars are hurrying across the marketplace, and there are many more behind, spilling from one of the churches.
‘Your hat,’ the pardoner murmurs to Thomas. Thomas pulls it on, quickly covering the patch of shaved skin. Katherine can feel herself stiffening as they pass. She realises she is holding her breath. One of them is ruddy-faced, a drinker, with eyes that linger on Katherine’s crotch, and she feels horribly naked, and steps behind Thomas.
When the friars have passed, the pardoner takes them to find the mule, and when he has paid the boy off, they pass down a narrow road to a grey sweep of sea-slimed stone staithes. Ahead is the sea, under a huge stretch of pale sky, and boats and ships of every imaginable size bob in the puckered waters.
It takes her breath away.
‘Dear God,’ she murmurs.
All along the quay men are busy among the stacks of sarplers and bales, the casks of wine, piles of logs, coils of thick ships’ rope and canvas-covered heaps of only the Lord knew what. The smell is a mixture of salt and fish guts and something else.
They walk along the quay a little way until they come to a quiet spot by a pile of conical wicker baskets leaking green water back to the sea.
‘Look to the mule,’ the pardoner instructs, ‘while I find the harbour master, and, Thomas, you’d better cut our sister’s hair so that she looks less like a Katherine and more like a Kit.’
So in one thoughtless stroke, Katherine becomes Kit, and Thomas borrows the pardoner’s knife and cuts her hair, dropping the hanks on the ground around her feet. She can feel his fingers on her scalp and her skin prickles with ill ease. She can feel her back arching, her shoulders rising, as if to escape his touch. Then he sits while she takes up the knife and attempts the same with him. She starts slowly, trying not to touch him, chopping at his thick hair until she sees she will have to hold it to cut it. She can feel his discomfort too. She stops to examine the wound above his ear. She flakes away some of the pardoner’s salve and sees the wound is livid under it.
When the pardoner comes back he shouts with laughter.
‘Saints above! He looks like a madman!’
She says nothing, but she too cannot help laughing at Thomas’s piebald head. He pulls on his cap.
‘Have you found a ship, sir?’
‘I have. The carrack Mary leaves for Calais on the next tide.’
‘Calais?’
‘Yes, but have no fear. Master Cobham is happy to put in at Sandwich before he crosses the Narrow Sea. Sandwich is in Kent, scarcely a day’s walk from Canterbury. So that has fallen well, thanks be to God. Not that the Mary is as comfortable as I should like, and Master Cobham is rather brusque, but there you are: non licet omnibus adire Corinthum. It is not given to everyone to visit Corinth, you see?’
The pardoner takes Thomas back to the market to buy bread and whatever else they might find. Katherine remains alone among the baskets.
Now is her chance. She begins going through the packs on the mule’s back, looking for the one where the pardoner keeps his money. Is this it? The one with the jar of salve. Where is it? She cannot find it. She stops, sick with shame, as a boy with half an ear leads past a train of mules, and then a man follows holding a dead badger, never quite happy with the way he is carrying it.
Dear God! Where is the pack? Her fingers are numb as she struggles with the knots. There. She finds it. It is inside a rough sack, a disguise. She is pulling it out when the pardoner and Thomas return in a hurry. They’ve bought cheese, bread, a sack of apples and three wineskins apiece, and they’ve even managed to sell the mule for a good price. Now they keep glancing over their shoulders and the old man misses her returning the pack.
‘We must be quick about it,’ he says. ‘The friars are astir over something and it is more than two apostates.’
The pardoner glances at Katherine, and she looks away. He shakes his head as if to clear some thought and she knows he knows. She wonders when he will tell Thomas.
‘Come on,’ he says, and they hurry to find this Master Cobham, who is standing with his hands on his hips watching a long-beaked hand crane swing a bale of something heavy on to the deck of a three-masted ship.
This is the carrack Mary, about twenty paces long, and low in the water. Cobham turns when he sees them and watches them approach without a change of expression. Up close he is solid, with sandy hair and the sort of face that mottles in the wind. He touches his hat in an ironic salute.
‘Day to you,’ he says.
His glance lingers on Katherine, and she feels herself warm under it, but after a moment he turns and shouts to the men on the crane to load the pardoner’s bags. The pardoner is especially careful about the pack with the salve in, and he will not trust it to anyone else. She sees Cobham’s pale eyebrow cock and her doubts about the man harden to mistrust.
‘Yours, my boy,’ the pardoner says, handing Thomas the pollaxe. ‘Best not let it stray.’
Then the horse-dealer’s boy arrives with a bag of coins and when everything is aboard, the pardoner turns and strokes the mule’s nose. There are tears in his eyes, though the animal stares back without emotion.
‘Goodbye, old friend,’ he says. ‘Perhaps we shall meet again when I come back through this way, a new man?’
As the boy leads the unprotesting mule away, Katherine follows the pardoner across to the carrack via a gangplank. She does not think to let Thomas take her hand even though it is offered and after a moment she steps down into a curious world that shifts beneath her feet.
Hardly an inch of the ship’s planking can be seen for sacks and barrels and bales and all manner of wooden spars. There are coils of rope, canvas sheets and two huge and badly rusted anchors. In one corner a dark-skinned man sits on an upturned bucket and warms his hands on a fire that smoulders in the middle of a broad slab of stone. Other men linger in the ropes, staring at the newcomers. There must be about seven or eight of them, each as wiry and wild-looking as the next.
‘You’ll be stopping in there, if you’ve a mind,’ Cobham says, nodding to a plank door below the raised deck at the stern of the ship.
‘Very good,’ the pardoner says and he picks his way across the deck to prise open the door. An insistent stink billows out, stronger even than that of the sea: an unholy combination of vomit and the privy.
‘Gets mighty cold out here at night,’ Cobham continues with a smirk.
It begins to snow again, fat wet flakes that settle on the pardoner’s hat. Katherine looks along the wharves to where the mule is disappearing in the gathering gloom. Two black-robed friars have stopped the boy. Benedictines.
‘Let us try the cabin,’ she says.
The pardoner catches her glance.
‘Indeed,’ he agrees. ‘Ignis aurum probat, miseria fortes viros.’
There is no light, only slatted apertures, and the floor is sodden and the walls are crusted with something that has long set hard. The pardoner pulls the door shut after them.
‘We need only stay until we set off and are out of reach of the friars,’ the pardoner tells them as they hold their breath. He peers through the gap in the window.
‘Or until that man hands us over,’ Katherine says.
‘Yes,’ the pardoner agrees, ‘he looks like the worst sort but I have only paid him half what we owe, with the promise of the other half on safe delivery in Calais, where I have said I
am to be met by associates with the balance. He will not let us go to the friars without collecting that, but knowing we are wanted might make the journey more awkward – and more expensive – than need be.’
They sit in the sulphurous dark, listening to the voices outside. At length there is silence. It seems the friars are gone.
‘Thanks be to God for that,’ sighs the pardoner. They can only see his eyeballs in the dark. Footsteps fall on the ladder beside the door and someone shouts and then more feet fall and there are more shouts and suddenly the ship shudders and lurches and seems to come alive. Katherine impulsively grabs Thomas’s arm. She feels him stiffen.
‘We’re casting off,’ the pardoner says. Above them on the rear deck they can hear Cobham bellowing rhythmically, as if encouraging some physical effort.
She lets go of Thomas’s arm, just as the pardoner claps his hands to his cheeks.
‘Dear Christ on His cross!’ he exclaims.
‘What? What is wrong?’
‘We have made no offering to St Nicholas,’ he says. ‘We have made no offering for a safe journey.’
7
THE WIND COMES from the east, bringing with it ranks of lace-topped swells that roll under the carrack, lifting her and dropping her nearer the lee shore. Master Cobham, standing on the aft deck, legs spread and his leather hat pulled low over his brow, swears.
‘God’s wounds!’ he bellows. ‘God’s holy wounds!’
On the deck the pardoner and Thomas crouch together, heads between their knees, clinging to the ship’s listing side with raw hands.
‘We shall be wrecked,’ the pardoner shouts over the wind. ‘We should have said a Mass. Should have said a hundred of them.’
He retches again and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. In the night he has pulled a muscle from all the vomiting and now his face is yellow, his eyeballs bloodshot, and his beard slimed with something not even the rain can wash away.
By the evening he is too weak to sit and, with the help of Katherine and the ship’s boy, Thomas carries him back into the cabin and hoists him into a stained canvas hammock.
Kingmaker: Winter Pilgrims Page 9
