The Knight's Tale

by M. J. Trow

  The elder Glanville stifled a snort.

  ‘… And I see now that I clearly dodged an arrow with that one.’

  ‘But His Grace didn’t.’ Chaucer got them all back to the night in question. ‘Blanche was in his bed, but had apparently gone before he became ill. In that she appears to have suffered no ill-effects, we can assume that she wasn’t poisoned too.’

  ‘So, we come to motive.’ The elder Glanville topped up everybody’s drink. ‘That list I gave you, Geoff,’ he said. ‘Any good?’

  ‘Yes and no,’ Chaucer said enigmatically. ‘To be sure that Lionel alone swallowed the draught, surely it had to be administered by somebody inside the castle. Merely having it delivered, say in a bottle of Gascony, would target everyone and might not even reach Lionel at all. In fact, depending on the trustworthiness of the chosen carrier, it might not reach the castle at all.’

  ‘Off the list, then.’ Glanville knew when he was beaten. ‘Who would want to see Lionel dead?’

  Chaucer hated himself for saying it, knowing his old friend’s feelings, but he really had no choice. ‘Violante,’ he said.

  ‘Now, just a minute …’ Glanville held up his hand.

  ‘You can call “Hoo” as often as you like, Richard,’ Chaucer said, ‘but we’ve got to face it. Lionel was trying to regain his lost youth with Blanche, and, as I understand it, there had been plenty of others.’

  ‘Granted,’ the knight said.

  ‘How must that have made Violante feel? A scorned woman, Richard, with the volatility of an Italian thrown in.’

  Chaucer and the squire looked at Glanville.

  ‘And poison is a woman’s weapon,’ Hugh said, and the other two now looked at him.

  ‘No,’ Glanville said, after a moment’s hesitation. ‘She’d have used a stiletto or whatever they call poignards in Italy. I will concede that I harbour feelings for Violante – what full-blooded man would not?’ He glanced at Hugh, who was trying not to smirk at his old pa’s admission. ‘But I agree with you, Geoff. Wouldn’t a woman scorned, wronged beyond endurance, want to watch the old bastard’s face as she plunged her knife into him?’

  Chaucer’s face said it all. There was clearly a side to the Lady Violante that the comptroller had never seen. Speaking for himself, he had always sought out placid women, when he sought one out at all. His Pippa could be annoying from time to time, but if she had a temper, he had never seen it. He bowed to Glanville’s superior knowledge.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘We’ll set Violante aside for the moment. Who else might want Lionel of Antwerp dead?’

  There was a pause.

  ‘Richard Glanville,’ said Richard Glanville.

  The others exploded in a flurry of denials, but the knight held up his hand. ‘I know you dismissed it when you first arrived,’ he said, ‘but you’ve got to be dispassionate, Geoffrey. With Lionel out of the way, I can continue in Violante’s service, living here rent free with my horses and my hawks. And’ – he watched his companions’ faces for a moment – ‘I may have a chance with the lady herself.’

  ‘Well, if it’s suspects you want,’ Hugh said, not wishing to be outdone, ‘what about me?’

  More explosive denials.

  Hugh’s hand was in the air too. ‘My knighthood has been delayed for too long. Loyal to His Grace as I was, his involvement with Blanche – my Blanche as she once was – meant that I have still not yet won my spurs. With him gone, the honour passes to you, Pa, and I’ve achieved my goal – a knighthood and revenge for losing Blanche. It works perfectly.’

  There was a silence. It was the Comptroller of Woollens who broke it. He held out both his hands and took the right hands of both Glanvilles. ‘My dear friends,’ he said. ‘I have known you, Rich, since I was a boy and you, Hugh, all your life. A kinder, straighter, more noble pair of comrades in arms I could never wish to meet this side of Paradise. If either of you wanted to kill Lionel of Antwerp, you would have done it face to face, with a sword in your hand. Then you would have taken your own lives and gone to Hell for doing both murders. He leaned forward and winked. ‘You’ll have to do better than that, you know.’

  All three chuckled.

  ‘Father Clement,’ Glanville said, leaning back and cradling his cup.

  ‘Did not die by hemlock alone,’ Chaucer told him. ‘Perhaps it wasn’t working for some reason; perhaps it was too slow; perhaps whoever our killer is, came to check on him, found him still alive and strangled him.’

  ‘His face,’ Glanville remembered, with a suppressed shudder.

  ‘Contorted,’ Chaucer said. ‘Terrified.’

  ‘Who knows about poisons?’ Hugh asked. ‘What hemlock can do?’

  ‘I’m glad you asked that,’ Chaucer said. ‘An apothecary would know and you kindly put me in the direction of one.’

  ‘Alban,’ Glanville clicked his fingers. ‘Did you find him all right?’

  ‘Eventually,’ Chaucer conceded. ‘And his amanuensis, Roger.’

  ‘Who?’ the Glanvilles chorused.

  ‘Something I need to pursue,’ the comptroller said. ‘But first, we’re overlooking somebody, right here in the castle.’

  ‘Who?’ Glanville asked.

  Chaucer’s eyes swivelled to Hugh. ‘How’s Giovanni’s swordplay coming along?’ he asked.

  ‘Giovanni?’ Hugh was confused. ‘Well, he’s not bad, but too hot-headed … Wait; how do you mean?’

  ‘John Hawkwood told Violante that Lionel had been responsible for her father’s death; Giovanni’s father too, right?’

  ‘Right!’ The knight’s eyes lit up. Suddenly, it was all falling into place.

  ‘Violante, for all her flashes of fury, is a nuanced practitioner of politics,’ Chaucer reasoned. ‘You don’t survive long in the Visconti family without that. She understands how the world works. All right, so Lionel killed her old man. That’s what Italian, not to mention English, politics is all about. But Giovanni now, sixteen, naïve, hot-headed … You see the way my mind’s working?’

  ‘And he wouldn’t use a sword,’ Hugh said. ‘Hence the poison.’

  ‘The whole thing hinges,’ Chaucer said, ‘on whether Giovanni was privy to the second conversation that Hawkwood had with Violante. In the first one, he was furious, accusing Lionel of all kinds of things. Then, having had a chance to talk to him, man to man, he realized that he’d been wrong. It wasn’t Lionel who killed Violante’s father, it was Marco Blanco, the Count of Perugia. In the second conversation with Violante, Hawkwood put that right.’

  ‘But …’ Hugh was confused.

  ‘But was Giovanni there then?’ Chaucer threw back at him. ‘We know he was there for the first; but what of the second? What if he was there, but didn’t believe him? Either way, he would have a clear motive for wanting Lionel dead.’

  There was a silence while the Glanvilles wrestled with the information.

  ‘So, how do we—’ Hugh began.

  ‘We don’t,’ Chaucer stopped him. ‘You do, Hughie, my boy. Tomorrow, first thing, take him out to the lists. Oh, damn, it’s Sunday. After Mass, take him out to the lists. Let him win a few passes, bolster his ego, praise his swordplay. Then get him talking about Hawkwood.’

  ‘He does that anyway,’ the younger Glanville muttered. ‘Sun shines from the man’s arse.’

  ‘Good, good,’ Chaucer said. ‘And let me know what he says about Lionel and his father. And put that bloody bottle away, Richard; I’m never going to find my room again as it is!’

  It was pleasantly warm in the private chapel to the right of the nave in the church of St Peter and St Paul in the town. Chaucer had told the local priest that he was in need of solitude while attending the service and the chapel, with its slanted prayer-slit that faced the altar, would be perfect. The local priest fully understood that and he also fully understood the fistful of coins that Chaucer passed his way.

  Instinctively, because he’d done it all his life, Chaucer went through the motions of the Mass, although he
was grateful that there was insufficient room in the little chapel for him to lie flat on the ground for the prayers. The priest’s Latin was audible and surprisingly accurate for a provincial cleric and not too many of the congregation left part of the way through. They had been seen by their peers and that was the important thing.

  But Chaucer was not there to prostrate himself before his God. He was there to watch the censer-swinger, the former altar-boy turned apothecary’s assistant, called Roger. The lad looked much more angelic that Sunday, soon after dawn though it was. His hair was combed and the stubble on his chin was shaved. Above all, he had adopted this holier-than-thou appearance as he swung the brass censer, the cloying smoke drifting across the church to the annoyance and dismay of the consumptives. Roger knew his business at St Peter and St Paul as well as he did in the apothecary’s shop and Chaucer waited until the service was over.

  He emerged from his hiding place once the priest and his people had gone to the robing room, bobbed on one knee before the altar, crossed himself and loitered outside, making small talk with the great and good of Clare. Yes, the young king was shaping up nicely; time he got himself a wife, however. That Anne of Bohemia seemed a nice girl, so the merchants said. But what about that John of Gaunt, eh? About to make himself king of Castile, or so some merchants had testified. Then there was du Guesclin. Hanging, Chaucer was told, was far too good for the French bastard. He was supposed to be a knight but had no chivalrous ideals at all. Anyway, he’d had his bollocks cut off in a clash with the Burgundians, so that would cramp his style a bit. That would explain, one of Chaucer’s chatterers contended, why du Guesclin had been caught wearing women’s clothing – at least sixteen local merchants had seen that with their own eyes.

  By now thoroughly exhausted with current affairs, Chaucer was glad to catch sight of Roger sauntering down the church path and gratefully took his leave.

  ‘Good morning,’ the comptroller hailed the censer-swinger.

  Roger took a moment to realize who Chaucer was and that he was talking to him. ‘We ain’t open today,’ he said. ‘Master Alban is a God-fearing Christian, despite what you might have heard. It’s the Sabbath.’

  ‘It is indeed,’ Chaucer smiled. ‘But I have no business with the apothecary, not today. It’s you I wanted to talk to.’

  Roger was already striding towards the town and Chaucer had to increase his pace too. ‘Why?’ the apothecary’s assistant asked.

  ‘Father Clement,’ Chaucer said.

  Roger’s step faltered and his eyelids fluttered. Then, he gathered his composure and decided to brazen this one out. ‘What of him?’

  Chaucer took the boy’s arm and stopped him in his tracks. ‘Do you want me to tell you that here?’ he asked. ‘In the public highway, on the Sabbath?’

  Roger’s eyes swivelled from left to right and back again. ‘In here,’ he muttered and led Chaucer beyond the pig pens and the tanneries to a door in a high wall. He fumbled with the lock and pushed it open. The pair stood in a yard, open to the sky, and reeking of pigswill. ‘It’s the outbuildings of the priory,’ Roger said, in response to Chaucer’s expression. ‘We won’t be disturbed.’

  A little shiver ran up Chaucer’s neck and threatened to dislodge his liripipe. What had Roger in mind? And could the lad have so misread an upstanding pillar of society, father of three – or was it four? – and Comptroller of the King’s Woollens? In all his forty-odd years, he had never been placed in such a tricky position – and so near a nunnery, too. However, the comptroller needed answers and he might not get a second chance.

  ‘I found writings,’ Chaucer said, ‘in Father Clement’s room at the castle. I’d have to call them love letters.’ He was whispering now, imagining the ears of thirty or more sisters pressed to the stone on the other side of the wall. ‘Letters addressed to you, Roger.’

  ‘I never got any letters,’ the boy said.

  ‘Did you write any?’ Chaucer asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Can you write?’

  ‘Of course. I’d be a fine apothecary’s assistant if I couldn’t. Tinctures don’t mix themselves, you know; you’ve got to know what you’re doing.’

  This was going better than Chaucer had expected. ‘There you have it,’ he said. ‘Tell me about tinctures.’

  ‘What do you want to know?’ Roger asked.

  Chaucer narrowed his eyes. ‘How old are you, boy?’ he asked.

  ‘I shall be nineteen next Michaelmas,’ the lad told him.

  ‘Right. Now, I don’t care what you and the priest got up to. That’s between the two of you and your Maker. If you want to risk Hellfire …’

  ‘We loved each other!’ Roger suddenly blurted out so that the words rang around the walls. The sisters must have recoiled at that, their ears throbbing with the noise.

  Chaucer saw silver tears drop from the lad’s eyelashes. What a tortured soul. A less kind man would have dragged the boy to the bishop’s consistory court where his abominable crimes would be exposed to the world. Roger’s back would be raw with whipping and he would stand outside the church of St Peter and St Paul in a white sheet on three successive Sundays. Undoubtedly, Alban the apothecary would have to let him go. And how would he pay the crippling fine then? But Geoffrey Chaucer, whatever else he was, was a kind man and he let it go.

  ‘Good for you,’ he said quietly, crossing himself in his head. ‘But the sad fact is, Roger, that the man you loved is dead. And he was poisoned.’

  Roger blinked back the tears. ‘Poisoned?’

  ‘Hemlock,’ Chaucer said. ‘Poison parsley. Do you know it?’

  ‘Conium maculatum; yes, I do.’ Roger was still trying to take in what Chaucer had told him, crossing himself and sobbing. ‘Who would want to kill Father Clement?’ he wailed.

  ‘My question precisely.’ Chaucer consoled the boy with a pat as manly as he could make it. ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘did the Father mention anyone who had taken a dislike to him?’

  ‘He was the loveliest of men,’ Roger sobbed. ‘Kind and loving.’

  ‘Yes, yes, of course, but priests hear things – you know, in the confessional. They acquire secrets, secrets which are sometimes dangerous. Was there someone who the Father was wary of? Suspicious, even?’

  ‘The secrets of the confessional remain so,’ Roger said. ‘Clemmie wasn’t a gossip. He took that kind of thing very seriously.’

  ‘I understand,’ Chaucer said. ‘Of course he did.’

  ‘Master Chaucer,’ Roger looked at the comptroller with fear in his eyes.

  ‘Yes, dear boy?’

  ‘I know that His Grace Lionel of Antwerp was murdered. But … two men in the castle of Clare in as many weeks. Is it all by the same hand?’

  ‘That would be my guess,’ Chaucer said. Roger said nothing.

  ‘So you can’t help me further?’ the comptroller checked.

  The boy shook his head, his shoulders hunched, his eyes red. The loss of the love of his life was bad enough, but to lose him in so vicious a way to a killer was too much. Chaucer was just glad that the lad hadn’t found him – that would have murdered his sleep for the rest of his life.

  Chaucer turned to go, believing that the listening sisters had heard more than enough for one day. ‘Have you come across Signor Giovanni Visconti?’ he asked. ‘The Lady Violante’s brother?’

  Roger was wiping his eyes on his sleeve. ‘Sixteen or so?’ he sniffed. ‘Blue eyes, fine hair, neat feet? No, not really. Why do you ask?’

  ‘Er … no reason,’ Chaucer said. ‘No reason at all.’

  The three of them stood on the battlements of Clare as the sun dipped below the great elms beyond the river: Richard Glanville, knight of great renown; Hugh Glanville, the squire of endless promise; and Geoffrey Chaucer, poet and, always, Comptroller of the King’s Woollens.

  ‘It’s not Roger.’ Chaucer was sure. ‘I thought perhaps he had the knowhow – a man of tinctures, after all. And I thought perhaps a lover’s tiff …’ The elder Glan
ville cleared his throat uncomfortably – he was the wrong generation for all this. ‘But I don’t think so, unless the lad is a better actor than anyone I’ve seen.’

  ‘Let’s see how he performs in the pageant,’ Hugh smiled. ‘I understand the apothecary’s people are joining forces with the goldsmiths – frankincense and myrrh; magi in the morning.’

  They looked out over Clare as the torches were lit and the bell tolled in the priory for Vespers. The church of St Pater and St Paul looked as if it were made of beaten bronze in the dying sun. Filling every open space, it seemed to Chaucer, the great wagons of the pageant stood ready to be yoked to the oxen, one tier above the other where Adam’s tree stood dripping with Satan’s evil and Hellmouth yawned for the unwary. From somewhere in the shadows, they heard the solemn thud of a drum and the rattle of a tambour.

  ‘Shawms,’ the elder Glanville muttered suddenly. ‘God, I hate shawms.’

  The others ignored him. ‘What happened with Giovanni this morning, Hugh?’ Chaucer asked.

  ‘He wasn’t exactly talkative,’ the squire said. ‘As you suggested, I let him win the odd bout.’ He rubbed his right shoulder and flexed it gingerly. ‘Damn near broke my arm into the bargain. Even so, I got the impression he was rehearsing for a mummer’s role in the pageant.’ He used both hands to mime the Italian’s mouth being sewn shut. ‘Then I remembered, and that’s thanks to you, Pa – Romonye; it never fails.’

  ‘Don’t blame me,’ Glanville chuckled. ‘I didn’t shell out a small fortune to turn you into a tippler.’

  ‘Ah, the sweet wine of the Hellespont,’ Chaucer smiled. ‘We owe the Greeks a lot.’

  ‘Romonye’ll get a man under the table faster than anything else I know,’ Hugh said. ‘Sure enough, a quaff or two and Giovanni was singing his head off.’ He clicked his tongue. ‘So young,’ he smiled. ‘So young.’

  Chaucer and Richard Glanville were smiling too, but for an altogether different reason. They were remembering warm nights of their youth, the empty bottle lying on the grass between them as they watched the sun set through the boughs of the orchard at Clare. The drowsy feeling when they felt that they could move mountains, while at the same time being unable to stand up unaided. Good times.