‘Well, Master Chaucer, I must confess that I am not much the wiser.’
Geoffrey shrugged as if he too were in the dark. But an idea was beginning to take shape in his head. He rose.
‘You will excuse me, steward. I have to visit my wife.’
‘I did not care for that poem about the saint, Geoffrey,’ said Philippa.
She spoke regretfully as if she would like to have liked it. Husband and wife were sitting in Philippa’s apartment, the one where Chaucer had encountered John of Gaunt and Katherine Swynford together a few weeks earlier. The most uncomfortable part of the conversation was over. Geoffrey had asked Philippa directly about her friendship with Carlos de Flores. She didn’t seem put out by his words. Perhaps the man’s death made such questions seem necessary, instead of painful or impertinent. Philippa replied that the Castilian was a friend to all ladies, and that she was not such a fool as not to see what kind of a man he was. Besides, she added, he was interested in her more on account of her sister, and that not because he was such a fool to believe he could have Gaunt’s woman for himself but for some other reason. And de Flores also asked several questions about him, Geoffrey, her husband.
It was now that Geoffrey started to talk about the Beornwyn poem, the one Philippa didn’t like.
‘I wrote down the account of a saint, which I heard first at Bermondsey Priory. As I was writing it I found that the picture of the woman, Beornwyn, began to change in here –’ Geoffrey tapped his temple, ‘– and I wondered if she was as pure and holy as she’d been reputed. I meant no harm in what I did. The woman was long gone, and her life and her death were rich but faded like an old tapestry. Why not add another thread to the picture? I did not reckon on the audience at the Savoy Palace being so . . . so . . .’
‘So pure, so holy?’ said Philippa, with amusement. ‘You must remember, Geoffrey, that though all of us might be educated and sophisticated people we also have regard to the proprieties. My sister is a devout woman.’
Geoffrey nodded. That was true. He continued: ‘I believe that the Castilians, or some of them, want to create a division between your sister and the Duke of Lancaster. They do not like the fact that she lives in the same house as their queen. I think they plan to use my poem to help open up the division by suggesting that Katherine is like Beornwyn, devout and pure in the eyes of the world, but . . .’
‘Like all women,’ said Philippa. ‘Someone with her own wishes and desires.’
‘Just so,’ said Geoffrey, grateful that she had put the matter in her own way and, in his gratitude, thinking that he ought to keep company with her more often.
‘But none of that explains why de Flores was killed,’ said Philippa. ‘If he was killed, that is.’
‘What happened on the night when I read the poem?’ said Chaucer. ‘Later on, I mean. Did you catch sight of Carlos de Flores?’
Geoffrey himself had not remained long in the audience chamber. He could see the recital had not gone down well. He had no wish to stay and receive tepid compliments. By the late light of the summer evening he returned to Aldgate by himself, just as William the porter was about to close the city gates.
After a pause, Philippa answered him: ‘I saw de Flores talking to someone, a man. They were standing close together in a corner by a window. The chamber was not so full by then, John of Gaunt had already left and my sister followed shortly afterwards. I recall thinking it was unusual. If de Flores was going to be discovered talking quietly in a corner, I’d expect a woman to be involved. He and the man did not know that they were being observed. It was growing dark outside. There was some dispute, I think. De Flores suddenly strode out and the man seemed to go off in pursuit of him.’
‘You know who the man was?’
‘No, and I have not seen him here in the Savoy before. But he had a battered countenance – and, Geoffrey, now I remember that you were talking to him before you read out your poem!’
‘Then it must be Edward Jupe, the knight. The knight of the battered countenance describes him well. He was in company with a lady, a demure-looking lady.’
‘Oh, it is Alice Osterley. She is one of the Queen’s demoiselles, like me, though I scarcely know her.’
‘Where was she when this dispute was taking place?’
‘I don’t know. She was not in the corner with the men.’
‘Was it possible the argument was over her?’
‘Geoffrey, I cannot say for certain. But, yes . . . Carlos de Flores had been . . . paying attention to Alice, I believe . . . as he paid attention to several of Constance’s women.’
Now Chaucer stood up. It was obvious who should be questioned next.
He thanked Philippa, and noted the slight disappointment on her face as he left. He turned back and they kissed. Yes, he really must keep company with her more often.
He returned to the cell-like office, wondering where and how he would lay hands on Sir Edward Jupe. The answer proved easier than he’d expected once he talked to Thomas Banks. He began by asking what Banks observed on the evening of the Beornwyn reading before leading the conversation round to Sir Edward. The steward explained that he quit the audience chamber shortly after his master, John of Gaunt. But Banks was able to tell Geoffrey Chaucer a little about the knight’s history.
Although Jupe came from a family that could hardly count itself as noble, a family that possessed nothing more than some desolate acres in Lincolnshire, the knight had done a great service to John of Gaunt on the borders of Aquitaine several years ago. He protected the Prince during a fierce skirmish with an advance guard of the French, protected him almost at the cost of his own life. Of course, any knight would have done the same, willingly laid down his life for his liege lord. But, said the steward, something about the way Sir Edward bore himself after the attack, together with his modesty and meekness in response to Gaunt’s gratitude, caused the Duke to take Jupe to his heart. He seemed to the Prince the very model of what a knight should be: courteous, courageous and chivalrous. He might not be as well-born as some but he had an innate nobility. He became a friend of Gaunt’s, as far as a king’s son may have friends. Chaucer nodded. He knew that the Duke of Lancaster was loyal to his friends.
Then, after the French war, Sir Edward dedicated himself to other causes, even campaigning in the cold northern countries near the edge of Russia. Always he wore his lady’s favour. This was the opening Geoffrey was looking for. Almost casually, he asked Thomas Banks about Sir Edward’s lady. Was she in the court of Savoy? Indeed, said the steward, he believed that the knight was favoured by Alice Osterley. In fact, she too had been present on the evening of the Beornwyn reading. Yes, said Chaucer, pretending to remember, I saw them together!
Not a single word that Thomas Banks said indicated he was aware of any unhappiness between the knight and his lady. Any unhappiness, any dispute or jealousy. Chaucer had that knowledge only from Philippa. But then his wife was likely to be better informed than the men in the household.
‘Tell me, Geoffrey, you surely don’t suspect Sir Edward of having a hand in this matter?’
‘Not in the slightest,’ said Chaucer, reflecting, not for the first time, how easy he found it to tell a lie. ‘It is only that he may have some information about Carlos de Flores. I would like to speak to him. Do you know where I might find him?’
‘I believe he and his page lodge somewhere south of the river. He is often to be found in a tavern on that side, though its name escapes me.’
The Tabard in Southwark?’
‘It may be.’
This was enough for Geoffrey. Within the hour he found himself once more back inside the Tabard. He was greeted cheerfully by the host, Harry Bailey. He even took a drinking cup of the Rhenish wine that Bailey had been pressing on him. (It was as good as the inn-keeper claimed.) There was no thin-lipped, red-capped firebrand to disturb his drinking with talk of reducing the Savoy to a pile of ash. There were no pilgrims assembling to begin their journey to the shrine in Canterb
ury.
But there was a lanky knight sitting in a corner. Sir Edward Jupe was by himself. He was staring at a wooden pint pot on the table in front of him. He did not look up as Geoffrey approached. The knight of the battered countenance had turned into the knight of the woeful countenance.
‘I hope I find you well, sir,’ said Chaucer, feigning surprise.
‘Who . . .? Oh, it is the maker. The poet, Geoffrey Chaucer.’ The slightest smile of recognition passed across Sir Edward’s gloomy features.
‘I last saw you at the Savoy Palace,’ said Geoffrey, as if that encounter had taken place months before rather than a couple of days earlier. He sat down on the bench by the knight.
‘Do not talk to me of that evening, Master Chaucer. I prefer to forget it, and to forget the night that followed. It was a bad business.’
Chaucer nodded, not expecting to get to the quick of the matter so soon.
‘I wish I had stayed my hand,’ Sir Edward continued.
Chaucer wondered whether he was about to hear a confession of murder but what the knight said next left him more baffled.
‘What were those lines in your piece?’ Jupe took a swig from his pint pot before, furrowing his battered brow, he recited from memory:
‘For woman may seem holy, pure and true,
Yet, all within, be frail as I or you.’
It took Geoffrey a moment to recognise his own handiwork. This was a rhyming couplet – and not a very good one either – from his poem about St Beornwyn. It occurred when the narrator was speculating that the good woman might not have been quite so good, after all. Sir Edward Jupe had seized on these unremarkable words after hearing them just once, he had stored them in his head, and was repeating them back to their creator. In other circumstances, Geoffrey might have been flattered. Now what he felt was a creeping dismay.
‘I don’t understand you, Sir Edward.’
‘What you said about women is all too true, Master Chaucer. Nevertheless, I regret what I have done.’
‘But I do not know what you have done.’
‘Why, I put pen to paper, as you do.’
If Chaucer had been baffled before, he was now utterly confused.
‘Sir Edward, let us speak plainly so as to avoid all misunderstanding. We are talking here of a Castilian gentleman by the name of Carlos de Flores?’
‘Oh, him.’
The expression on Jupe’s face was unreadable. Was it a grimace? A sneer? A trace of guilt?
‘You were observed talking with him at the Savoy Palace. You were angry.’
‘We exchanged words, it is true.’
‘Words before blows?’
‘No blows. I did not offer him violence,’ said the knight, in a mild, almost surprised fashion.
‘But you were seen following de Flores out of the room.’
‘I did not follow him, Master Chaucer. I merely left shortly after him.’
‘You did not see where he went?’
‘No, and I do not care where he went either. As far as I’m concerned he may go to . . . to the lowest pit.’
‘Sir Edward, you are aware that Carlos de Flores is dead? He was found on the foreshore of the river next morning.’
This time the knight did respond. His lined face became suffused with a dull red. He fumbled with his hands on the table and knocked over his pot of ale. Liquid dribbled, unregarded, onto the floor. This was no act, Geoffrey reckoned. Sir Edward was genuinely shaken by the news. It was some time before he said anything more, and then it was only to ask for confirmation. Briefly, Geoffrey Chaucer described the outward circumstances of the Castilian’s death.
‘So then, the fellow is no more. You cannot think I had anything to do with it, Master Chaucer. If I had fought with that foreign gentleman, it would have been done in the open and in an honourable manner, not using a knife in the dark down by the water.’
‘Yet you were in dispute with him over a lady?’
‘I discovered that my lady Alice had been . . . I found out that he had been pressing his attentions on her . . . and though she struggled to resist his blandishments . . .’ Sir Edward sighed.
Chaucer waited, but when no more came, he said: ‘What did you mean about regrets then? About putting pen to paper?’
‘When I left the Savoy Palace I returned to my lodgings on this side of the river. I fear that I was not altogether in my right mind. That very night I sat down and wrote to my lady Alice in a manner that was impetuous and foolish. I did not address her dishonourably but I believe I did not use those terms of respect and esteem that are her due. When I . . . when I came to myself again, it was too late to recall the letter. It had already been dispatched to the Palace. I sent my squire with the thing and he put it into my lady’s hands himself. And now she has opened it and, without a doubt, she has read my unkind words and read them again . . . and again . . .’
Sir Edward Jupe seemed to notice for the first time that he had spilled his drink on the floor. He watched the ale settling into the grooves between the flagstones.
‘Your squire can confirm all this? That he took the letter to the palace and so on.’
‘Why, yes. Simon would no more utter a falsehood than—’
The knight faltered. Geoffrey realised that he’d been about to say that he would never lie. Perhaps he thought it was too boastful a claim to make about himself. Chaucer clicked his fingers for the pot-boy and ordered another pint for the disconsolate lover. He might as well drown his sorrows. And Geoffrey too felt a certain sorrow for Sir Edward. He did not think that the lanky individual next to him had killed the Castilian. He was capable of killing, of course, but he would not do it on the sly.
When the fresh ale arrived, Chaucer took his leave of Sir Edward Jupe. On the way out he settled his score with Harry Bailey.
‘A good man, that,’ said the landlord, slipping the coins into his apron, and indicating the knight in the corner.
‘Yes,’ said Chaucer.
‘One of my most devoted customers too.’
Instead of returning to the Savoy, Geoffrey went back to Aldgate. There he was able to clear up at least one part of the mystery. To Joan and young Thomas he showed the ruby on the golden chain, which the steward had taken from de Flores’s body. The housekeeper did not recognise the item but Thomas, who had had enough presence of mind after the attack to enumerate the rings that the thief wore on his hands, said he was almost sure it was the one around the man’s neck. Geoffrey complimented him once more on his sharp eyes. Then he went into his office to think.
It was plain enough that Carlos de Flores was the one who’d stolen the Beornwyn copy from this very room. And the reason for the theft was that the Castilians in the Savoy wanted to get their hands on the poem to see whether they could use it as a weapon in their campaign against Katherine Swynford. They must have heard something of its contents but not been able to lay hold of one of the two copies that Geoffrey had already sent to the palace. The more he thought about the matter, the more obvious it seemed. Quite against Geoffrey’s intentions – indeed, the notion had never occurred to him – the poem about St Beornwyn worked subtly in their interest. That is to say, it could be interpreted as being against Katherine and so in favour of Constance.
Why else had the priest, Luis, been the only person to single Chaucer out for congratulations on the night of the reading, and why had he done so in a very public manner? The fact that Geoffrey was Katherine’s brother-in-law might be very useful to them. See, the Spaniards could say, even the family of John of Gaunt’s mistress disapprove of her and of her behaviour. Why, the poet Geoffrey Chaucer has penned a story about a woman who pretends to be pure but who is, in reality, driven by her passions, by her appetite for men. In itself, these whisperings would hardly be enough to drive a wedge between Gaunt and Katherine but it all helped to spread unease and distrust in the household. Once again, Chaucer wished that he’d never heard the tale of Beornwyn from the Prior of Bermondsey. It had brought him nothing but t
rouble.
But was the killing of de Flores connected to the wretched poem or not? Geoffrey had already spoken to two men, John Hall and Sir Edward Jupe, with reasons to dislike, even to hate, the Castilian. He still did not think that Jupe had killed de Flores. He believed the knight was genuinely a man of honour. But was it not conceivable that he had pursued his rival all the way down to the foreshore of the river and there, in a fit of drunken madness, stabbed him to death? Jupe would know where to strike quick and deep. It was the sort of violent action he could perform in his sleep. And, by his own account, he’d been the worse for wear. ‘Not altogether in my right mind’ was his roundabout way of describing his condition while writing the fatal letter to Alice Osterley. Geoffrey had just seen for himself that the knight was as ready to wield a pint-pot as he was a sword. And hadn’t the landlord of the Tabard called him one of his most devoted customers?
Yet, of the two suspects, it was John Hall who seemed much the more likely to have done the deed. As a secret agent in the pay of Thomas Banks, he had easy access to the Savoy. He was also working for Carlos de Flores, or pretending to work for him. At any rate he was being paid by the Castilian. Not paid enough, though. Suppose there had been a prearranged meeting down by the river that night and then a row over money during which Hall stabbed de Flores? The red-capped man was capable of anger. Chaucer remembered his outburst in the Tabard.
De Flores must have had other enemies. Given his womanising reputation at court, there must be any number of husbands and lovers and suitors bearing a grudge against him. With a mixture of amusement and discomfort, Geoffrey considered that he might even be counted among them. After all, he’d seen for himself his wife and the Castilian strolling easily in the Savoy gardens. Had heard her laughter, seen his casual touch on her arm. Bearing a grudge wasn’t the same as sticking the knife in, but one might easily lead to the other.
It was with relief that Geoffrey turned back to some paperwork that had to do with his wine and wool responsibilities. There was something simple and clean about the lists of quantities, about the additions and subtractions and the rates of duties and tax that was far removed from the messy, bloody world of human affairs.
The False Virgin Page 22
