The Knight's Tale

by M. J. Trow

  Glanville turned his eyes to heaven. It was never pleasant to see a friend go stark staring mad in front of your eyes, but what could he do?

  Ferrante lowered himself enough to take the clean platter and wasted no time in brandishing it under Butterfield’s nose. Butterfield growled something that was impossible to hear but looked as though it could be some very basic Anglo-Saxon. Ferrante shrugged and took up a proprietorial stance near the wine goblets. Butterfield took up a similar position near the ale.

  Glanville, still watching his friend like a hawk, in case of sudden collapse through poisoning, gestured to the two. ‘Look at them,’ he said. ‘Like two rutting stags. And all over a plate of … does it have a name?’ He raised his voice. ‘Master Ferrante?’

  The seneschal looked at him and cocked an interrogative ear.

  ‘What was this muck called?’

  ‘Conchiglie con cinguettii in aglio e latticello,’ he said, with a bow.

  ‘A plate of foreign muck,’ Glanville concluded. He took a deep draught of ale. ‘So, tell me,’ he leaned in closer to Chaucer, ‘what did you find out on your travels? I’ve hardly seen you.’

  ‘I did indulge in a lie-in,’ Chaucer admitted. ‘Then I went to watch Hugh and young Visconti in the lists.’ He paused to think. ‘What then? Oh, yes, then I broke up a fight between Butterfield and Ferrante. Then’ – he spread his hands – ‘here.’

  ‘So?’ Glanville folded his hands and looked attentive.

  ‘Well,’ Chaucer said, ‘I discovered, as if I didn’t already know, that Vickers is definitely one bell short of a peal and violent with it.’ He looked about him. Ferrante was looking at him but with the blank expression common to seneschals. They seemed able to switch off their brains but leave their faces doing the work of watching.

  ‘Also, that Blanche is … well, Blanche, I suppose. That nuns have a sense of humour.’

  ‘Now that I don’t believe,’ Glanville chuckled. ‘Wait a bit. Nuns? Don’t tell me Vickers has actually put that poor girl in a nunnery?’

  ‘He has,’ Chaucer confirmed. ‘But she had been practising in advance, by meeting a monk in a disused chamber at Borley Manor.’

  ‘Poor Lionel. Did he know, do you think?’

  ‘I have no idea,’ Chaucer said. ‘It was difficult to get anything that sounded truthful out of Blanche when it came to her dear Li-Li …’

  Glanville’s eyebrows shot up into his hair.

  ‘Except that I do believe that the wine in his room was already opened and that he was going to get rid of the priest.’

  ‘Clement? Really?’ Glanville nodded. ‘That doesn’t surprise me. Do we know why?’

  ‘Well, she says because he was being a little too up close and personal with boys of the town, but as Blanche has but one thought in her head, that might not actually be the case. He may have been stealing, or spying, any number of other things. It does give him a motive, though. He is very attached to Lady Violante and won’t take kindly to being sent elsewhere.’

  ‘True. I know that Violante has saved him from dismissal at least once before. She is too kind for her own good, I sometimes think. Violante …’

  Chaucer smiled and moved his attention to other things. Poor Sir Richard – he was like a lovesick boy, needing to hear the name of his beloved, if only from his own lips; Chaucer just hoped it would not end in tears.

  Chaucer knew he had to play this one carefully. What passed between a man and his priest in the confessional was known only to God and God – Chaucer crossed himself at the irreverence of his sudden thought – wasn’t talking. But the comptroller was less interested in what Father Clement had to say about the late Lionel of Antwerp than what he had to say about himself.

  It was late evening before he padded his way up the spiral staircase to the priest’s quarters and the brazier on the walls threw wild, twisted patterns of flame onto the stones. Gargoyles leered at him from porticos and he smiled to himself to think of how, as a boy, he had been afraid of them. Belial was there, Lord of the cult of sodomy; Succor-Benoth, chief eunuch of the House of Infernal Princes, jealously guarding his locks and bolts; the three-headed Haborym, commander of the Twenty Legions of Hell. He had scurried beneath them as a child, head down, eyes averted. Now, he looked up and smiled at them, happy that his innate goodness could counter their communal evil. And, anyway, they were just carvings made out of stone, by men with too much imagination.

  Damn! Chaucer’s way was blocked halfway along the landing by ropes. There must be some work being done at this level in the keep, but no one had mentioned it and he had heard no hammering or sawing in his wanderings. He’d have to go back, cut past the swannery and the Lion Tower. Oh, well, after Ferrante’s delicious meal, he needed the exercise.

  If the stone devils had scared him witless before his beard grew, the old lion had been worse. His name, aptly, was Daniel, and you could smell him half a mile away. But as Lionel of Antwerp had told young Chaucer the first time he met the animal, Daniel could smell you a whole mile away; that was the worry. Daniel was old and his mane was coming out in clumps. He didn’t have all his teeth either, and Lionel’s party piece had been to stroke his nose and kiss him on top of his head. Both these facts had calmed young Geoffrey, but, even so, those little yellow eyes never left him. Daniel’s attributes were superior to Chaucer’s in every respect; he was stronger, he was bigger, he ate people given half a chance and, if his teeth were no longer up to it, his claws could rip a man to shreds in two shakes of his great tail.

  But that was then, Chaucer remembered. The mangy old boy had dropped dead one day and no one knew why. He was not replaced, but was buried with all solemnity across the moat, at the edge of the orchard in apple blossom time. Chaucer stopped. There was a gurgling sound. He thought he’d heard it the first day he’d arrived at Clare with young Hugh, but he thought his ears were playing tricks. He hadn’t had the need to come this way before, but, yes, there was no doubt about it. There was a big cat in Daniel’s den, although the comptroller couldn’t actually smell anything. Chaucer turned left to the door that led to the stairs. It was locked. Damn all over again! He padded back down. Now, he’d have to take the walkway that ran along the top of the lion enclosure. Well, so be it. How bad could it be? He could hear the king’s lions roaring through the night in his bed in the Aldgate, all the way from the Tower. He was far above the thing here; perfectly safe.

  The light from the brazier dappled the walls and there was a growl to his right. Chaucer looked down into a black pit. A lioness lay there, ears flat, teeth bared, looking up at him from what had once been a roebuck, its ribs exposed, its intestines stretched along the ground.

  There was a slam behind him and Chaucer whirled, his dagger in his hand. The door had closed and there was no wind on earth that could move a slab of oak and iron like that. The cat leapt up, snarling and screaming with the sudden noise. She ran at the wall and threw herself upwards, her claws clashing on the stone, inches from Chaucer’s waist. He flung himself backwards, then hurtled along the walkway to the far door. This merited more than a mere damn. It too was locked. No coincidence in the world could explain this – a roped-off stairway; two locked doors. Chaucer’s heart was in his mouth; not that that would have bothered the lioness for a moment – especially as her sister undulated out of the shadows and made a lunge at the comptroller too.

  Chaucer would never claim to be an expert on wildlife. He lay in bed sometimes and watched the mice chase one another along the rafters of his little room. As long as they weren’t eating his food or peeing in his shoes, he found them quite good company. He had played his part in many hunts, of animals from as small as a hare to as large as a boar, and that was all fair in love and war, he felt. But being caught in a lions’ den and surviving – he suspected that that might lie above his skill level. He was not a devout man, but at that moment, he began to wish he had been a whole lot more so; he might be having to explain himself to St Peter any moment now.

 
Chaucer dropped his knife, which bounced off the wall and clattered onto the floor of the pit. The one thing which might keep him alive was now lying uselessly on the ground. One of the cats sniffed it and moved on. The comptroller kept telling himself that he was fifteen feet above the animals roaming the half-light below him. They couldn’t possibly jump that high unless … Unless there was a tree trunk at a rakish angle against the far wall. Its bark had been stripped long ago by vicious claws in practice for just such a moment as this. Chaucer was suddenly, nauseously, aware of the cat smell. He saw the beady yellow eyes again, as in his boyhood nightmares, and there were four of them this time.

  How long he stood there, he never knew. His feet felt like lead and sweat was making his houppelande clammy. One of the lionesses was prowling at the base of the tree. From its top branches, she could reach him in a single bound. It would be a long reach, but then, the lioness was long and she could smell the man’s fear.

  There was a crash to his left and the door swung wide.

  ‘For God’s sake, Geoffrey,’ Richard Glanville said. ‘What are you doing in here?’

  ‘Shitting myself, Richard,’ Chaucer gulped. ‘Thanks for asking.’

  Glanville remained confused. ‘But … where were you going? This isn’t on the way to anywhere.’

  ‘I might ask, then,’ Chaucer said, getting on his high horse as he was prone to do when scared out of his wits, ‘why you came looking for me here?’

  ‘I can recognize a Chaucerian shriek probably better than the next man,’ Glanville said mildly.

  ‘I shrieked?’ Chaucer had no memory of that.

  ‘The echoes are still ringing.’ The knight hung over the pit and yelled at the cats, who looked calmly up at him with unblinking eyes, opening their mouths in a soundless roar. ‘I don’t know why we keep these,’ he said. ‘They take a lot of feeding and it isn’t as though you could pet them. But Lionel – well, he didn’t like to let the old ways go.’

  ‘He made a lot of changes, though,’ Chaucer pointed out. ‘I keep getting lost here.’

  ‘Always adding,’ Glanville said. ‘Never subtracting.’ He looked around. ‘I’m sorry, Geoff, but even allowing for getting lost, I just don’t …’

  Chaucer was dumbfounded. ‘But …’ he waved his arm. ‘There was rope, just here. That door’ – he tried it and it opened on silent hinges – ‘locked tight. I had no option but to go through the Lion Tower.’

  Glanville weighed the options. Either Chaucer was going mad, or someone was trying to kill him. And, what with one thing and another, the latter seemed the obvious choice.

  ‘Did anyone know where you were going?’ he asked.

  Chaucer thought and shook his head. ‘I didn’t tell anyone. Only you. And I don’t think anyone overheard, do you?’

  ‘I shouldn’t think so. It was pretty loud, like it always is when people are eating. Unless Lady Eleanor … no, it couldn’t have been her. She walks with a stick and is deaf as a badger.’

  ‘Lady who?’ Chaucer had enough to contend with without more suspects to litter the path.

  ‘She was the woman sitting next to you. You accidentally shared your … worms in vomit … with her. She wasn’t happy.’

  ‘I don’t think the average person throws you to the lions because of a bit of pasta splashing, though, do they?’ Chaucer remembered the woman who was grumpy but seemed to take it as well as could be expected.

  ‘No. I wonder … could it be Clement?’

  Chaucer raised his eyebrows. ‘Let’s go and ask him, shall we?’ He knew it would be weeks, if ever, before the stink of cat and the gleam of those yellow eyes would leave his nightmares.

  The chapel was in darkness, apart from the light burning to guard the Host. The hanging oil lamp was shaded with red glass and gave out a low but steady gleam. Chaucer peered round the door, which had creaked open at his touch, with a sound to waken the dead.

  Except that, it didn’t waken the dead. Crouched before the altar, folded over like a sleeping baby, was Father Clement, his head almost touching his knees. The sanctuary light threw his face into deep shadow, but there was no doubt in the men’s minds, as they padded silently up the nave, that he was dead. There was something about the one extended arm, with its clawed fingers desperately reaching for help that would never come, that spoke of death, and not a peaceful one.

  Glanville, as the one with the better-functioning knees, bent to the priest and gently turned him onto his back. The extended arm flung back with the movement and the back of the hand slapped on the stones with a sickening noise that made Chaucer’s heart turn over in his chest. The face, exposed to the dim, red light, was that of a soul in torment, the lips drawn back and the eyes staring. Flecks of foam besmottered the clean-shaven cheeks and the smell was appalling. The priest had vomited before he died and it lay, slick and noisome on the flags. Glanville wiped his hand surreptitiously on the priest’s cloak, thrown aside onto a chair as he had come in, ready for a man who would not need clothes again, apart from his winding sheet.

  Glanville stood up and stepped back, crossing himself. ‘What happened here?’ he whispered. ‘Did he have a seizure of some kind?’ He looked around and dropped his voice still more. ‘Divine retribution?’

  Chaucer sniffed the air. ‘Not unless God is a giant mouse,’ he said, crossing himself and sending a silent apology aloft. But it wasn’t right; he was not an expert in vegetable poisons, he would be the first to admit, but he had never got the impression that poisoning with hemlock caused such contortions and distress. But … the smell was unmistakeable. Even if this church was full of the poorest mice in the parish, it couldn’t be that strong.

  ‘Mouse? Again? I can’t …’ Glanville sniffed, gingerly. ‘Do you mean that acid, musty, metallic, cabbagey, horse-uriney sort of smell?’

  Chaucer shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Personally, I just call it mouse. But you can smell it, can you?’

  ‘I can,’ Glanville said. ‘Sadly.’ He sniffed his fingers. ‘It’s very clinging, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’m afraid so. You might want to wash that hand, though. And’ – he turned his foot up and looked at the sole – ‘I think we both need to wash our shoes and change the moss. I don’t know if anyone ever died from hemlock poisoning through the soles of their feet, but I don’t want to discover that by dying.’

  Glanville held out his hand to the side, as though by distancing himself from it, he could stop the poison. He looked around him. ‘Is there any water here?’ He looked at Chaucer. ‘Would it be sacrilegious to wash in holy water, do you think?’

  ‘I would say so, yes,’ Chaucer said, drily. ‘Let’s use water from the well just outside, shall we?’ He turned to go down the nave.

  ‘What about …?’ Glanville looked at the body on the floor, the dreadful face turned fruitlessly to the man’s God.

  ‘We’ll cover him,’ Chaucer said. ‘Use his cloak.’

  They each took a corner and let the woollen fabric encase its late owner gently, as if they were tucking up a sick child.

  ‘We’ll send some of the women,’ he said, ‘to clean him and prepare him. Then a couple of likely lads from the wardrobe, to take him to his cell. Then, we can send him to God, with all the right offices.’

  ‘We must warn the women,’ Glanville said. ‘Make sure they know about the poison.’

  Chaucer looked at his old friend and smiled. It was clear that the knight had never lived with people below his own station, people who used the plants of the ways and highways for good or evil. ‘They will know the smell,’ Chaucer said. ‘They will have been warned as children against hemlock – no real country child will ever touch cow parsley for fear it is hemlock in disguise. They will have warned their children and perhaps even their grandchildren. But yes, I will make sure they know.’

  ‘Will you send Joyce?’ Granville was still wondering what, if anything, was left between the two.

  ‘If she is the first I see,’ Chaucer said, in dudgeon. ‘Other
wise, not.’

  ‘She’d do a good job,’ Glanville pointed out.

  ‘Joyce does everything well,’ Chaucer rejoined and then wished he hadn’t.

  ‘I’m sure she does,’ Glanville said, leading the way out of the chapel. ‘I’m sure she does.’

  It was, of course, imperative that the chapel was tidied and the cleric’s body made decent before anyone else stumbled upon it, particularly Violante, who had a habit of visiting the priest between devotional hours. She knew, if he didn’t, that tongues wagged, but, as she pointed out to her women when they told her what was being said, it is in the eye of the beholder.

  So, Glanville went to head off Lady Violante if need be, while Chaucer went in search of some servants to clean the chapel. After a few false starts, he found the laundry and ran the gauntlet of the washerwomen and headed to the back room, looking for Joyce. As expected, she was there, lovingly smoothing out her lady’s linen with her glass slickstone. Her natural smile broadened to a grin when she saw Chaucer.

  ‘Geoff!’ she said, not pausing in her work. ‘What brings you here? I saw you with that foreign muck at table today. You did a manful job there, pretending you liked it.’ She pulled a face, with her tongue out. ‘Nasty stuff.’

  ‘I quite liked it,’ Chaucer said. ‘But … can you do me a favour, Joyce?’

  ‘Anything,’ she said, resting her slickstone to one side. ‘Name it.’

  ‘It’s a bit unusual.’

  She smiled again. ‘I do unusual, Geoff. You know that.’

  He coughed and tweaked the shoulders of his houppelande into place. This needed some gravitas and it was hard to have that with Joyce. ‘The priest is dead.’

  She looked at him, her head on one side, like a bird listening for a worm. ‘Is that some kind of code, Geoff?’ she asked. ‘Some kind of London talk?’

  ‘No,’ he said, advancing and putting his hands down on the stretched linen. She batted him away. ‘Sorry. No, it means, quite literally, no more, no less, that the priest is dead. Father Clement, in the chapel. Poisoned.’