‘So I’ve heard,’ I said, prepared for this. ‘Secret alliances with the Scots, French agents lurking behind every door.’
‘Twenty of them at last count, held without surety.’
‘All the more reason to move Mark Blythe, then, for he’s no spy,’ I said. ‘Relieve the overcrowding, put a petty criminal out of your mind.’ Almost there. ‘You can say it was your idea, sound leader that you are.’
He blew out a breath. ‘A pound, Gower. It’ll take a pound to move him, what with that touchy keeper they got, dealings with the Guildhall—’
‘Wonderful,’ I said. ‘We’ll deduct it from your balance.’ Tugg was still down to me many pounds; another handful of shillings would make little difference.
‘See here, Gower—’
‘Nothing to see, Tugg. I have your debt, I have your note. And I have the most horrendous bit of—’
‘Ludgate, then,’ he said, with another thick sigh. ‘He’ll be there till delivery.’
I gave him a hard look. ‘Live delivery.’ He nodded.
Outside Newgate I retrieved my pattens, then trudged through the walls and up the muddy way to Holbourne, breathing shallowly on the bridge as I neared the outer reaches of the ward. Before the churchyard at St Andrew a wild-haired man preached to the drizzle, his only parishioners a crescent of nosing goats. I caught a snatch of verse as I ducked into the narrow alley just east of Thavie’s Inn.
‘Full long shall he lead us, full rich shall he rule,
Through pain of pestilence, through wounds of long war.
Yet morire is matter all sovereigns must suffer.’
All kings must die. True enough, and the lines were well wrought, though the preacher soon lapsed into the usual fare. Corruption, gluttony, lust, the coming holocaust of the unfaithful. I wondered how long the poor man would last before joining Blythe in his cell.
At street level Monksblood’s stood open to the weather, a brick wedged beneath the alley door. I leaned in and gave a nod to the keeper. He tossed me a jar. At the foot of the stairs sat his daughter, a slight thing of about eight. With her foot resting on the next cask, she angled my jar beneath the tap and carefully turned the bronze spigot. I dropped a few pennies in her little palm. A wan smile, tired eyes bright for a moment beneath her shining brow, then she looked past me and up the stairs, waiting for her father’s next fish.
With the sour ale on my tongue I surveyed the undercroft tavern, lit weakly by a row of lanterns dangling from heavy beams. The tables were nearly empty, just two groups of men clustered along the hearth. Masons, fresh from work on the bridge. I got a few sullen looks. Steam rising from damp clothes, the muffled clatter of boots overhead.
In the far corner my friend sat alone, frowning into his jar as his finger traced a slow arc around its mouth. He seemed coiled on the bench, his brow knit, his eyes narrowed in concentration, the whole of him tensed against some unspoken thought.
‘Geoffrey,’ I said, and moved forward.
Half-turning with a start, he rose, his face blossoming into a smile. ‘Mon ami.’ He spread his hands.
As my arms wrapped his frame I felt the familiar surge of anticipation: for court gossip, for poetic banter, for news of mutual acquaintances. Yet beneath the thin coat I also felt ribs, hard against tightened skin. Chaucer had lost a couple of stone that winter; there was less to him since his latest return from abroad, and his unfashionable surcoat, of undyed wool cut simply with straight sleeves, lent an almost rural aspect to his bearing. Normally he would dress like a bit of a fop. I wondered what explained the change.
For a while we just drank, saying nothing, two hounds sniffing around after a long separation. Eventually he leaned over the board. ‘How has it been, John? You know …’
I looked away. ‘Let’s not bleed that wound, Geoffrey.’
He let that hang, then touched my elbow. ‘I hope it has started to heal, at least.’
‘I had her things removed and sold at Candlemas – most of them.’ Candlemas: purification, purging, the scouring of the soul and the larder. I thought, as I hadn’t in weeks, of Sarah’s prayerbook, its margins and flyleaves full of her jottings. It was one of the few of her possessions I had kept.
Chaucer moved his hand away. I asked about Philippa. He picked a splinter from the table. ‘Keeps to court, hovering around her sister and the Infanta. It doesn’t help that I’m travelling all the time. Calais, the cinque ports.’
‘And this recent trip, to Tuscany and Milan? The custom was able to spare you?’ Back in November Chaucer had arranged for a deputy to step in for him at the customhouse. His trip south had been planned hastily, and for reasons he had kept to himself.
‘Some negotiations for the chancellor: a bribe here, a false promise there.’ He pushed a lump of talgar across the table. The Welsh cheese was an epiphany on my tongue: tart, rich, deliciously illegal. ‘Though this trip was a bit less official than the last. Inglese italianizzato, diavolo incarnato.’ He feigned a sinister smile.
An Englishman italianized is the devil incarnate. ‘A judgment you inspired, I suppose?’
‘You’ve been practising!’
I hadn’t, though the odd lesson from Chaucer in recent years had taught me a few useless phrases. ‘Donde il formaggio?’ I said awkwardly, pretending to look around for the cheese.
He smiled. ‘It’s dov’è il formaggio, John, not donde. Where is the cheese, not where is the cheese from.’ He pushed the talgar my way.
‘Dov’è. Right.’ I knifed another wedge.
He went on about his trip. ‘And the books! In the Visconti libraries you can’t reach out a hand without—Speaking of books, I’ve brought you a little something.’ From his bag he removed a volume and set it between us. ‘Il Filostrato. A work that has reminded me of you since I first read it years ago, though I can’t quite say why. It’s a tragedy of the Trojan War, and a story of love. Not to your usual tastes, though I have a feeling you’ll enjoy it. And it will give me an excuse to teach you more Italian.’
I thanked him and stroked the embossed spine and cover. Calf, dyed a deep purple, cool and smooth. ‘The writer?’
‘Giovanni Boccaccio,’ he said. ‘I tried to meet him once, but he wouldn’t see me. A recluse, practically a hermit.’
‘Boccaccio.’ A name, like the talgar, worth savouring. I mouthed the rubrics as I leafed, admiring the ghostly thinness of the abortive vellum. No full-page illuminations, but the larger initials were ornate, with gold flourishes, a full palette of inks, descenders reaching out to curl around the peculiar beasts in the margins. There was a poem on the second leaf, a single stanza in a hand I knew well.
Go, little book, to our unfathomed friend,
Above his silvered head to build a shrine,
Retreat of Wisdom, Ignorance to mend.
Full oft there shall you comfort and entwine
His long limbs in bookish fetters benign.
Thou shalt preserve those aquamarine gems,
Or Gower’s friend shall cast you in the Thames.
As always Chaucer’s verse captured its subject with the precision of a mirror. My thinning hair, shot through with spreading grey. My long frame, which had two lean inches on Chaucer’s, and he was not a short man by any measure. Finally the eyes. ‘Gower green,’ a limner I once knew named their shade, claiming no success in duplicating it. Sarah had always likened them to her native Malvern Hills at noon, though she had died without fathoming the truth about these eyes, and their diminishing powers. Only Chaucer possessed that knowledge, expressed in a touching bit of protectiveness in the couplet.
I looked up to see him staring vacantly at the far wall. I closed the book.
‘Why did you want to meet here of all places?’
‘I’m less known in Holbourne,’ he whispered, in French, teasing, ‘where there’s smaller chance of recognition than within the walls.’
‘Ah, I see,’ I replied, also in French. ‘I am the object of a secret mission, then. Like your vi
sits to Hawkwood and the Florentine commune.’
His smile dimmed. ‘Hawkwood. Yes. You know, I spent some time with Simon while I was in Florence.’
‘God’s blood, Geoffrey!’
He looked uncomfortable. ‘You didn’t write to him after Sarah died.’
‘No.’
‘He’s your son, John. Your sole heir.’
The child who survived, when three others did not. I drained my jar, signalled the girl for another.
‘Have you heard from him?’ he asked, reading my thoughts.
A fresh dipper, and I drank deeply. ‘Tell me about your sons instead,’ I said, in a feeble change of subject. ‘How is Thomas faring at the almonry?’
‘Well enough, I suppose,’ he said.
‘And little Lewis?’
‘With his mother, the little devil.’ He gave a half shrug. ‘Some call him the devil, our Hawkwood. But I suppose our king knows what he’s doing when it comes to alliances.’
‘What few of them he has left,’ I said.
He looked at me, smiling. ‘No King Edward, is he?’
I held up my jar. ‘Full long shall he lead us, full rich shall he rule.’
His smile faded. ‘Wherever did you pick that up, John?’
‘A preacher, versing it up out on Holbourne just now.’
‘Our sermonizers are quite poetical these days, aren’t they?’ he scoffed. There was a certain strain in his voice, though I thought nothing of it at the time.
‘Fools, if you ask me, to versify on that sort of matter,’ I said.
‘Better to stick to Gawain and Lancelot, I suppose.’
‘Or fairies.’
‘Or friars.’
We laughed quietly. There was a long silence, then Chaucer sighed, tapped his fingers. ‘John, I need a small favour.’
Of course you do. ‘Go on.’
‘I’m looking for a book.’
‘A book.’
‘I’ve heard it was in the hands of one of Lancaster’s hermits.’
I watched his eyes. ‘Why can’t you get it for yourself?’
‘Because I don’t know who has it, or where it is at the moment.’
‘And who does know?’
He raised his chin, his jaw tight. I knew that look. ‘Katherine Swynford, perhaps. If a flea dies in Lancaster’s household she’ll have heard about it. Ask her.’
‘She’s your sister-in-law, Geoffrey.’ I felt a twinge of misgiving. However innocent on its face, no request from Chaucer was ever straightforward. ‘Why not ask her yourself?’
‘She and Philippa are inseparable. Katherine won’t see me.’
‘So you’re asking me to approach her?’
He took a small sip.
‘Why me?’ I said.
‘How to put it?’ He pretended to search for words, his hands flitting about on the table. ‘This job needs a subterranean man, John. A man who knows this city like the lines in his knuckles, its secrets and surprises. All those shadowed corners and blind alleyways where you do your nasty work.’
I gazed fondly at him, thinking of Simon, and so much else. It was one of the peculiarities of our intimacy that Chaucer seemed to appreciate talents no one else would value in a friend. Here comes John Gower, it was murmured at Westminster and the Guildhall; hide your ledgers. Hide your thoughts. For knowledge is currency. It can be traded and it can be banked, and more secretly than money. The French have a word for informers: chanteurs, ‘singers’, and information is a song of sorts. A melody poured in the ears of its eager recipients, every note a hidden vice, a high crime, a deadly sin. Or some kind of illicit antiphon, its verses whispered among opposed choirs of the living and the dead.
We live in a hypocritical age. An age that sees bishops preaching abstinence while running whores. Pardoners peddling indulgences while seducing wives. Earls pledging fealty while plotting treason. Hypocrites, all of them, and my trade is the bane of hypocrisy, its worth far outweighing its perversion. I practise the purest form of truthtelling.
Quite profitably, too. The second son of a moderately wealthy knight has some choices: the law, the royal bureaucracy, Oxford or Cambridge, the life of a monk or a priest. Yet I would rather have trapped grayling in the Severn for a living than taken holy orders, and it was clear that my poetry would never see the lavishments from patrons that Chaucer’s increasingly enjoyed. Yet I shall never forget the thrill I felt when that first coin of another man’s vice fell into my lap, and I realized what I had – and how to use it. Since then I have become a trader in information, a seller of suspicion, a purveyor of foibles and the hidden things of private life. I work alone and always have, without the trappings of craft or creed.
John Gower. A guild of one.
‘You can’t be direct with her about it,’ Chaucer was saying. ‘This is a woman who takes the biggest cock in the realm between her legs. She’s given Lancaster three bastards at last count – or is it four?’ He waited, gauging my reaction.
‘What is this book, Geoffrey? What does it look like? What’s in it?’
His gaze was unfocused and vague. ‘To be honest with you, John, I don’t know. What I do know is that this book could hurt me.’ He blinked and looked at some spot on the wattle behind me. Then, in a last whisper of French, ‘It could cost me my life.’
Our eyes locked, and I wondered in that instant, as I would so often in the weeks to come, what price such a book might extract from my oldest friend. He broke the tension with one of his elvish smiles. ‘If you can do this for me, John, get me this book, I’ll be greatly in your debt.’
As you are so deeply in mine, he did not say; nor did he need to, and in his position neither would I have. I left Monksblood’s that morning bound to perform this ‘small favour’, as Chaucer had called it, for the one man in all the world I could never refuse. The man who knew my own darkest song.
TWO
Gropecunt Lane, Ward of Cheap
Eleanor Rykener grunted, spat, wiped her lips. The friar covered his shrivelled knob. Wouldn’t meet her eyes, of course. Franciscans, they never liked to look. He dropped his groats on the straw. ‘Why thank you, Brother Michael,’ she said, her voice a sullen nip. The friar stared coldly at some spot on her neck, then shrugged on his cowl, edged around the old mare, and left the stall.
When she had dressed, Eleanor stepped out into the light rain, looking down toward the stone cross before St Pancras. The friar wouldn’t give that a glance either as he slunk around the corner of the churchyard toward Soper Lane. She raised her face to the sky, cleansing his piety from her tongue.
‘Regular as these little oinkers here.’ Mary Potts leaned against a post, gesturing to a dozen pigs nosing street muck.
Eleanor tossed her gossip a tired smile. ‘And never has the good grace to render me confession after I grant him service.’
They stood in silence for a while, watching the flow of late-afternoon traffic up along Cheapside, the creak of old wheels, the low calls of sheep, the urgings of hucksters, though the din seemed always distant from the ladies of Gropecunt Lane, a quiet byway of leased horsestalls and abandoned shopfronts that absorbed sound the way a dry rag absorbs ale, and as central as St Paul’s to the human business of London. Every now and then this business would be theirs, as some desiring man, face to the ground, mind on slit, would make the turn and find a maudlyn to take his groats and squirt. Despite the lane’s reputation, the girls kept things tidy, raking the dirt and pavers themselves, cleaning up after animal and man alike. It was their own small piece of the city, where jakes plucked coin from their purses and maudlyns tucked it into theirs, the ordinances be damned. A simple thing.
‘Afternoon, m’pretties!’
Eleanor turned. Joan Rugg lifted her skirts as she hopped from stone to stone in a vain attempt to avoid the mud.
‘What now what now what now,’ Mary Potts murmured.
With a final grunt, Joan heaved herself on to the pavers fronting the stalls and straightened her dress, a sh
apeless thing of stained wool. The Dun Bell, Joan’s girls called their bawd, with three chins stacked against her neck, lips full and always moist, beady eyes that moved more quickly than any other part of her, and a mass of matted hair entwined through the band of a wide hat she never removed. This, a splendid circle of leather and wool adorned with flowers of faded silk, had been given to her by a lover in her youth, she liked to recall. On that misty day its perch lent her large form an air of botanical mystery, as if the viewer were approaching a mountaintop garden above the clouds, or some strange, Edenic island in the sea. ‘You ladies seen our Agnes?’ she asked.
‘Not today,’ said Mary Potts.
‘Thought you sent her up Westminster on Tuesday,’ said Eleanor, suddenly concerned. As far as she knew Agnes Fonteyn had been consorting with one of the king’s substewards, a long-time jake who would request Agnes’s company for a few days at a time during royal absences.
‘Didn’t come through.’ Joan raised her sleeve to scratch at her forearm. ‘But I had a particular request for her this morning, from a fine gentleman of the Mercery. And a procuratrix’d like to make arrangements, right?’
‘You talked to her mother down Southwark?’ Mary asked.
‘Sign of the Pricking Bishop,’ Eleanor added quickly, naming a common house in the stews where Agnes’s mother had long peddled flesh.
Joan scoffed. ‘Would’ve had to wait in line a half day to get a word in. That whore’s swyving makes her daughter look like St Margaret.’
‘Did you try her sister?’ Eleanor said. ‘Lives up Cornhull.’
Joan wagged her head. ‘Took a peek in her fancy house, asked about a bit in Broad Street, but no sight of her ladyship.’
A dungcart turned up from St Pancras on the way to the walls, banded wheels groaning under the weight, the waste of man and beast souring the air. When the clatter receded, Joan turned back to them. ‘Can’t have my maudlyns vanishing on me, not with Lents about to pass, appetites built up as they are. Forty days of nothing, then a week of everything, in my experience.’
A Burnable Book Page 2
