by C. J. Sansom
As I passed the Shambles a blizzard of small goose feathers swept out from under a yard door, causing Genesis to stir anxiously. Blood, too, was seeping into the street. The war meant a huge demand for arrows for the King’s armouries, and I guessed they were killing geese for the primary feathers the fletchers would use. I thought of the View of Arms I had witnessed the previous day. Fifteen hundred men had already been recruited from London and sent south, a large contingent from the sixty thousand souls in the city. And the same thing was going on all over the country; I hoped that hard-faced officer would forget about Barak.
I rode on into the broad thoroughfare of Cheapside, lined with shops and public buildings and prosperous merchants’ houses. A preacher, his grey beard worn long in the fashion now favoured by Protestants, stood on the steps of Cheapside Cross, declaiming in a loud voice. ‘God must favour our arms, for the French and Scots are naught but the Pope’s shavelings, instruments of the devil in his war against true Bible faith!’ He was probably an unlicensed radical preacher, of the sort who two years ago would have been arrested and thrown in prison, but encouraged now for their hot favouring of the war. City constables in red uniforms, staffs over their shoulders, patrolled up and down. Only the older constables were left now, the younger ones gone to war. They looked constantly over the crowd, as though their rheumy eyes could spot a French or Scottish spy about to – what, poison the food on the stalls? There was little enough of that, for as Barak said much had been requisitioned for the army, and last year’s harvest had been poor. One stall, however, was filled with what to my astonished eyes looked like a heap of sheep droppings until, riding closer, I saw they were prunes. Since the King had legalized piracy against the French and Scots all sorts of strange goods from impounded ships had turned up on the stalls. I remembered the celebrations in the spring when the pirate Robert Renegar had brought a Spanish treasure ship up the Thames, full of gold from the Indies. Despite Spanish fury he had been feted at court as a hero.
There was an angry tone, different from the usual haggling, in the many arguments going on up and down the market. At a vegetable stall a fat, red-faced woman stood waving one of the testoons in the stallholder’s face, the white wings of her coif shaking with anger.
‘It’s a shilling!’ she yelled. ‘It’s got the King’s majesty’s head on it!’
The weary-looking stallholder slapped his hands down and leaned forward. ‘It’s nearly half copper! It’s worth eightpence in the old money, if that! It’s not my fault! I didn’t make this evil coinage!’
‘My husband got paid in these! And you want a penny a bag for these scabby things!’ She picked up a small cabbage and waved it at him.
‘The crops have been damaged by the storms! Don’t you know that? It’s no good coming to me making moan!’ The stallholder was shouting now, to the delight of some ragged urchins who had gathered round with a skinny dog, which stood barking at them all. The woman threw the cabbage down. ‘I’ll find better somewhere else!’
‘Not for one of those dandyprats, you won’t!’
‘It’s always those at the bottom that suffer,’ she said. ‘Poor people’s work is all that’s cheap!’ She turned away and I saw tears in her eyes. The dog followed her, jumping and barking round her ragged skirts. Straight in front of me she turned and aimed a kick at it. Genesis stepped back, alarmed.
‘Have a care, goodwife!’ I called out.
‘Pen-pushing lawyer,’ she yelled back. ‘Robed hunchback leech! I warrant you don’t have a family half starving! You should be brought down, the King and all of you!’ She realized what she had said and looked round, afraid, but there were no constables nearby. She walked away, an empty bag slapping at her skirt.
‘Quiet, good horse,’ I said to Genesis. I sighed. Insults about my condition still felt like a stab in the guts after all these years, but I felt humbled too. For all that I, like other gentlemen, might rail against the taxes, we still had money to put food on the table. Why, I thought, do we all put up with the King squeezing us dry? The answer, of course, was that invasion was a worse fear.
I passed down the Poultry. At the corner of Three Needle Street half a dozen apprentices in their light blue robes stood with hands on their belts, looking round threateningly. A passing constable ignored them. Once the plague of the authorities, the apprentices were now seen as useful extra eyes against spies. It was such a gang of youths that had sacked Guy’s shop. As I passed beyond the city wall again at Bishopsgate I wondered bitterly whether I was going to a madhouse, or coming from one.
I HAD FIRST MET Ellen Fettiplace two years before. I had been visiting a client, a boy incarcerated in the Bedlam for religious mania. At first Ellen had seemed saner than anyone else there. She had been given duties caring for some of her easier fellow patients, towards whom she showed gentleness and concern, and her care had played a part in my client’s eventual recovery. I had been astonished when I learned the nature of her malady – she was utterly terrified of going outside the walls of the building. I had myself witnessed the wild, screaming panic that came over her if she were made even to step over the threshold. I pitied Ellen, all the more when I learned she had been incarcerated in the Bedlam after she was attacked and raped near her home in Sussex. She had been sixteen then; she was thirty-five now.
When my client was discharged Ellen asked if I would visit her and bring news of the outside world, for she had almost none. I knew no one else visited her, and agreed on condition she would let me try to help her venture outside. Since then I had tried any number of strategies, asking her to take just one step beyond the open doorway, suggesting I and Barak hold her on either side, asking if she could do it with closed eyes – but Ellen had procrastinated and delayed with a guile and persistence more than equal to mine.
And gradually she had worked that guile, her only weapon in a hostile world, in other ways. At first I had promised only to visit her ‘from time to time’, but as skilfully as any lawyer she had manipulated the phrase to her benefit. She asked me to come once a month, then every three weeks as she was so famished for news, then every two. If I missed a visit I would receive a message that she was taken ill, and would hasten round to find her sitting happily by the fire soothing some troubled patient, having made a sudden recovery. And these last few months it had dawned on me that there was another element in the problem, one I should have seen earlier. Ellen was in love with me.
PEOPLE THOUGHT of the Bedlam as a grim fortress where lunatics groaned and clanked their chains behind bars. There were indeed some who were chained and many who groaned, but the grey-stone exterior of the long, low building was quite pleasant looking. One approached across a wide yard, which today was vacant except for a tall, thin man dressed in a stained grey doublet. He was walking round and round, staring at the ground, his lips moving quickly. He must be a new patient, probably a man of means who had lost his wits and whose family could afford the fees to keep him here, out of the way.
I knocked at the door. It was opened by Hob Gebons, one of the warders, a big bunch of keys jangling at his belt. A stubby, thickset man in his fifties, Gebons was no more than a jailer; he had no interest in the patients, to whom he could be casually cruel, but he had some respect for me, for I stood up to the Bedlam’s keeper, Edwin Shawms, whose cruelty was not casual. And Gebons could be bribed. When he saw me he gave me a sardonic smile, showing grey teeth.
‘How is she?’ I asked.
‘Merry as a spring lamb, sir, since you sent word you were coming. Up till then she thought she had the plague. Shawms was furious watching her sweat – and she did sweat – thinking we’d be quarantined. Then your message came and within an hour she was better. I’d call it a miracle if the Church allowed miracles now.’
I stepped inside. Even on this hot summer’s day the Bedlam felt clammy. On the left was the half-open door of the parlour, where some patients sat playing dice round a scratched old table. On a stool in a corner a middle-aged woman was weeping qui
etly, a wooden doll clutched firmly in her hand. The other patients ignored her; here one quickly got used to such things. To the right was the long stone corridor housing the patients’ rooms. Someone was knocking on one of the doors from the inside. ‘Let me out!’ a man’s voice called.
‘Is Keeper Shawms in?’ I asked Hob quietly.
‘No. He’s gone to see Warden Metwys.’
‘I’d like a word after I’ve seen Ellen. I can’t stay more than half an hour. I have another appointment I must keep.’ I reached down to my belt and jingled my purse, nodding at him meaningfully. I slipped him small amounts when I came, to ensure Ellen at least had decent food and bedding.
‘All right, I’ll be in the office. She’s in her room.’
I did not need to ask if her door were unlocked. One thing about Ellen, she was never, ever, going to run away.
I walked down the corridor and knocked at her door. Strictly, it was improper for me to visit a single woman alone, but in the Bedlam the usual rules of conduct were relaxed. She called me in. She was sitting on her straw bed, wearing a clean, blue dress, low-cut, her graceful hands folded in her lap. Her narrow, aquiline face was calm, but her dark-blue eyes were wide, full of emotion. She had washed her long brown hair, but the ends were starting to frizz and split. It is not the sort of detail you notice if you are attracted to a woman. Therein lay the problem.
She smiled, showing her large, white teeth. ‘Matthew! You got my message. I have been so ill.’
‘You are better now?’ I asked. ‘Gebons said you had a bad fever.’
‘Yes. I feared the plague.’ She smiled nervously. ‘I was afraid.’
I sat on a stool on the other side of the room. ‘I long for news of the world,’ she said. ‘It has been more than two weeks since I saw you.’
‘Not quite two, Ellen,’ I answered gently.
‘What of the war? They won’t tell us anything, for fear it may unsettle us. But old Ben Tudball is allowed out and he saw a great troop of soldiers marching past …’
‘They say the French are sending a fleet to invade us. And that the Duke of Somerset has taken an army to the Scottish border. But it is all rumour. Nobody knows. Barak thinks the rumours come from the King’s officials.’
‘That does not mean they are untrue.’
‘No.’ I thought, she has such a sharp, quick mind, and her interest in the world is real. Yet she is stuck in here. I looked at the barred window onto the yard. I said, ‘I heard someone down the corridor banging to be let out.’
‘It’s someone new. Some poor soul that still believes they are sane.’
The atmosphere in the room was musty. I looked at the rushes on the floor. ‘These need changing,’ I said. ‘Hob should attend to it.’
She looked down, quickly scratched at her wrist. ‘Yes, I suppose they do.’ Fleas, I thought. I’ll get them too.
‘Why do we not go and stand in the doorway?’ I suggested quietly. ‘Look out at the front yard. The sun is shining.’
She shook her head, wrapping her arms round her body as though to ward off danger. ‘I cannot.’
‘You could when I first knew you, Ellen. Do you remember the day the King married the Queen? We stood in the doorway, listening to the church bells.’
She smiled sadly. ‘If I do that you will press me to go outside, Matthew. Do you think I do not know that? Do you not know how afraid I am?’ Her voice took on a bitter note and she looked down again. ‘You do not come to visit me, then when you do you press and cajole me. This is not what we agreed.’
‘I do visit you, Ellen. Even when, as now, I am busy and have worries of my own.’
Her face softened. ‘Have you, Matthew? What ails you?’
‘Nothing, not really. Ellen, do you really want to stay here for the rest of your life?’ I hesitated, then asked, ‘What would happen if whoever pays your fees were to stop?’
She tensed. ‘I cannot speak of it. You know that. It upsets me beyond bearing.’
‘Do you think Shawms would then let you stay out of charity?’
She flinched a little, then said with spirit, looking me in the face, ‘You know I help him with the patients. I am good with them. He would keep me on. It is all I want from life, that and – ’ She turned away, and I saw tears in the corner of her eyes.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘All right.’ I stood up and forced a smile.
Ellen smiled too, brightly. ‘What news of Barak’s wife?’ she asked. ‘When is her baby due?’
I LEFT HER half an hour later, promising to be back within two weeks – within two weeks, not in two weeks, she had nudged our bargain in her favour again.
Hob Gebons was waiting for me in Shawms’s untidy little office, sitting on a stool behind the desk, hands folded over his greasy jerkin. ‘Had a good visit, sir?’ he asked.
I closed the door. ‘Ellen was as usual.’ I looked at him. ‘How long is it she’s been here now? Nineteen years? The rules say a patient can only stay in the Bedlam a year, and they’re supposed to be cured within that time.’
‘If they pay, they stay. Unless they make a lot of trouble. And Ellen Fettiplace don’t.’
I hesitated a moment. But I had made up my mind: I had to find out who her family were. I opened my purse, held up a gold half angel, one of the old coins. It was a large bribe. ‘Who pays Ellen’s fees, Hob? Who is it?’
He shook his head firmly. ‘You know I can’t tell you that.’
‘All the time I’ve been visiting her, all I’ve learned is that she was attacked and raped when she was in her teens, down in Sussex. I’ve learned where she lived too – a place called Rolfswood.’
Gebons stared at me through narrowed eyes. ‘How did you find that out?’ he asked quietly.
‘One day I was telling her about my father’s farm near Lichfield, and mentioned the great winter floods of 1524. She said, “I was a girl then. I remember at Rolfswood …” Then she clammed up and would say no more. But I asked around and discovered Rolfswood is a small town in the Sussex iron country, near the Hampshire border. Ellen won’t say anything else though, about her family or what happened to her.’ I stared at Gebons. ‘Was it someone from her family that attacked her? Is that why they never visit?’
Hob looked at the coin I still held up, then at me. ‘I can’t help you, sir,’ he said slowly and firmly. ‘Master Shawms is very particular about us not asking anything about Ellen’s background.’
‘He must have records.’ I nodded at the desk. ‘Maybe in there.’
‘It’s locked, and I’m not going to be the one to break it open.’
I had to get out of this tangle somehow. ‘How much is it worth, Hob?’ I asked. ‘Name your price.’
‘Can you pay me what it would cost to keep me the rest of my life?’ he said with sudden anger, his face growing red. ‘Because if I found out and told you, they’d trace it back to me. Shawms keeps that story close and that means he’s under instructions from above. From Warden Metwys. I’d be out. I’m not going to lose the roof over my head and a job that feeds me and gives me a bit of authority in a world which is not kind to poor men.’ Hob slapped the bunch of keys at his belt for emphasis, making them jingle. ‘All because you haven’t the heart to tell Ellen she’s foolish to think you’ll ever bed her in that room. Don’t you think everyone here knows of her mad fancy for you?’ he asked impatiently. ‘Don’t you realize it’s a joke up and down the Bedlam?’
I felt myself flush. ‘That’s not what she wants. How could she, after what happened to her?’
He shrugged again. ‘That only makes some women keener, from what I’m told. What else do you think she’s after?’
‘I don’t know. Some fantasy of courtly love perhaps.’
He laughed. ‘That’s an educated way of putting it. Tell her you’re not interested. Make life easier for yourself and everyone else.’
‘I can’t do that, it would be cruel. I need to find some way out of this, Hob. I need to know who her family are.’
‘I’m sure lawyers have ways of finding things out.’ He narrowed his eyes. ‘She is mad, you know. It’s not just the refusing to go out. All these fake illnesses, and you can hear her crying and muttering to herself in that room at night. If you want my advice you should just walk away and not come back. Send that man of yours with a message that you’re married, or dead, or gone to fight the French.’
I realized that in his own way Gebons was trying to advise me for the best. My best, though, not Ellen’s. Ellen mattered nothing to him.
‘What would happen to her if I did that?’
He shrugged. ‘She’d get worse. But if you don’t tell her, she will anyway. Your way is just more drawn out.’ He looked at me shrewdly. ‘Perhaps you’re afraid of telling her.’
‘Mind your place, Gebons,’ I said sharply.
He shrugged. ‘Well, I can tell you that once they get ideas fixed in their heads, it’s hard to get them out. Believe me, sir, I’ve been here ten years, I know what they’re like.’
I turned away. ‘I will be back the week after next.’
He shrugged again. ‘All right. Hopefully that will content her. For now.’
I left the office and went out through the main door, closing it firmly behind me. I was glad to be away from the fetid air of that place. I thought, I will find out the truth about Ellen, I will find some way.
Chapter Three
I RODE BACK to my house, quickly changed into my best clothes, and walked down to Temple Stairs to find a boat to take me the ten miles upriver to Hampton Court. The tide was with us, but even so it was a hard pull for the boatman that sultry morning. Beyond Westminster we passed numerous barges going downriver laden with supplies – bales of clothing, grain from the King’s stores, on one occasion hundreds of longbows. My sweating boatman was not inclined to talk, and I stared out at the fields. Normally by now the ears of corn would be turning golden, but after the bad weather of the last few weeks they were still green.
