The Knight's Tale

by M. J. Trow

  ‘Little …?’ Joyce was confused. She knew that Chaucer and Glanville were friends of longstanding, but even so …

  ‘The king,’ Chaucer said. A silence fell between them as they considered what he had said. Simple enough in itself, it had reminded them both of the gulf between them. Chaucer broke the awkward spell.

  ‘So, what is your costume, Joyce?’ He gave her another pinch for good measure.

  ‘Geoff,’ she said fondly. ‘You will always be a boy to me, you know. But I would much appreciate it if you stopped doing that.’

  ‘Sorry.’ Chaucer dipped his head and looked up at her through his lashes. He had almost forgotten how to flirt, what with his work, his paunch and his Pippa.

  She nudged him and his lamb wobbled, making it look more lifelike. ‘Does he have a name?’ she asked, apropos of nothing. ‘Your lamb?’

  ‘No,’ Chaucer said. ‘I’ve never thought of naming him. Why don’t you?’

  ‘All right,’ she said, and bit her lip. ‘Why not call him … Arthur? I’ve always wanted to call one of my boys Arthur, but their fathers never seem to like the name.’

  She was so matter-of-fact about it that Chaucer wanted to weep. The women of London would never sit beside him like this, letting him pinch them through a hole in his clothing. Pippa would slap his hand away and go off on some household task. But Joyce … once his Joyce … was a jewel among women. He cleared his throat. This business of chasing down a boy who would have to die at their hand … it was making him melancholy. ‘You didn’t tell me, what is your costume?’

  ‘You’ll find out soon enough, Master Geoffrey Chaucer. My old pa, he says I should be ashamed at my age – there, that’s all you’ll be told, until you see us tonight! We’ll be down in the town later, putting the finishing touches. But I think I can safely say, it will be our best float yet!’ She patted Arthur the lamb and jumped up. ‘I still have work to do, but I’ll see you later – and you will definitely see me.’

  And with that, she was gone. Chaucer stuck one arm out of the side of his smock and aimlessly scratched Arthur the lamb behind the ear. It was strangely soothing and he leaned back in the warmth again, thinking over what was to come.

  They did things differently in Milano; so this was, essentially, Giovanni Visconti’s first pageant. In the square, surrounded as he was by townsfolk and people who had crossed the fields from the countryside around, the great wagons which were the moving stages of the mystery plays were limbering up. Guildsmen and their companies were hopping on and off the lurching floats, their wheels creaking and groaning under the weight. The oxen’s muscles bunched and their eyes rolled and the drovers cursed and cracked their whips.

  The Italian had come upon the first play by accident, to be performed outside the mayor’s house. His Excellency and his very large retinue of family and servants had all crowded into the upper balcony of his townhouse as the great tree of the Garden of Eden ground to a halt under the eaves. Visconti was hemmed in on all sides by the throng, determined as they were not to miss the first pageant of the day. Halfway up the tree with its twisted, bark-covered trunk, the lad playing Satan peered evilly out of his scaly suit, with every scale lovingly sewn on by his mother. He was eternally grateful to whoever wrote the book of Genesis for making it clear that serpents had arms and legs in the good old days so that at least he could cling on for dear life and fend off some of the offal that he knew was bound to come his way. The Corpus Christi Guild was paying him over the odds for this, and everyone knew it was danger money.

  A great roar went up as Eve came demurely onto the wagon’s upper platform. She looked suspiciously like Agnes Toogood from Clare’s largest bakery, but she looked the part in her huge fig leaves. Most of the roarers, it is true, were the menfolk, shepherds from the fields and ploughboys from the furrows, who might volunteer to fetch the bread themselves a little more often in the future.

  Satan curled seductively as best he could, encased in his embroidered oilskin, and he held out an elderly apple to Eve. May was not a good time to find apples which looked anything other than wizened from overwintering, but the pair did their best.

  ‘No! No!’ the crowd shouted.

  ‘Don’t take it!’

  ‘He’s the Devil, he is. Just walk away!’

  But Eve knew the story and her role that day. She hesitated coyly, holding her finger up to her dimpled chin. Then she took the fruit and bit into it.

  ‘Abomination!’ one of the churchmen shouted. Everybody looked at him; surely, he knew how this one went?

  Adam stumbled on to wolf whistles, mostly from the women in the crowd. ‘He can give me an apple any day,’ somebody shouted and there were hoots of laughter. Eve passed him the fruit.

  ‘No,’ the churchman bellowed. ‘That’s forbidden!’

  But it was all too late. Predictably, Adam bit the apple. Satan gurgled triumphantly and raised both hands in sheer happiness, gripping the tree with his thighs and trusting to the God whose arch-enemy he was. Sure enough, missiles began to hiss through the air, thumping onto the Eden set and bouncing off Adam and Eve as well as the object of the crowd’s hatred.

  Even before the angel Jophiel appeared to rebuke the first humans to walk the earth, Adam and Eve engaged in a sensual embrace which threatened to unglue Adam’s fig leaf.

  ‘Abomination!’ the churchman bellowed again. ‘That’s not in the Corpus Christi script!’

  But he was drowned out by the mob who were loving this impromptu moment. Even the mighty Jophiel just had to stand there until the passion had cooled. Up on the balcony, the mayoress was doing her best to cover the children’s eyes and explain to her elder offspring that the evil of Satan could even be found here in their own dear Clare.

  Richard Glanville had seen it all before – in fact, he mused to himself, the Eve wasn’t half as luscious this year as the year before, though even so, he could understand Adam’s enthusiasm – and he eased his son’s doublet which tended to cut in under the arms, before sidling off behind Visconti towards the fish market by the river. The Flood was a series of blue-painted boards rolling over a cylinder at the front of the wagon, and David Ifaywer of the Carpenters’ Guild of St Anne stood like an ox in the furrow at the prow of the Ark. Gone was the finery of the Guild and in its place was a rough carpenter’s smock and apron, dangling with nails, awls and chisels. His own beard was covered in a false one, great strands hanging down to his waist. Shem, Ham and Mrs Noah all stood behind him, praying to the Lord for an end to the driving rain. Japhet, who had been a weak link through all the rehearsals, had failed to turn up and he would be sorry when he did; Ifaywer took his play-acting seriously and being left a son short was nothing short of a sacking offence in his eyes. Because the sun was shining, the lads of the guild threw buckets of water over the front row of the crowd, who shrieked with delight or outrage, depending on their mood. Visconti found himself with a face-full and wasn’t sure how to react; as the young master from up at the castle, he had something of a reputation to keep up, he knew. In the end, a pretty girl at his elbow took his hand and that made up his mind for him, and he followed her in and out of the crowd, twisting and turning like the fish beneath Noah’s bow.

  ‘Jack-in-the-Green, master?’ A cake seller stopped Richard Glanville, who refused with a grunt. The knight did, however, fall to the temptation of a pint of cuckoo-foot ale, his eyes crossing slightly as the combination of basil and ginger hit his tonsils. He fell for it every year, a perfect example of the triumph of hope over experience, and he always regretted it in the end.

  The girl who had attached herself to Visconti showed no sign of losing interest in her new beau and that, Glanville knew, would cramp the lad’s style if, as he and Chaucer suspected, he would use this day of days to work his evil once more.

  There was a shriek near the knight’s left ear. Instinctively, his hand dropped to his dagger-hilt, but it was nothing. ‘Leave off!’ a woman shrieked. She was a buxom lass and she was talking to Bob Whitlo
w, ironically of the Guild of St Mary the Virgin. As they swept past, Glanville heard her whisper, ‘Oh, all right, but up at the castle, later. My mama will have gone to bed by then.’

  Cain and Abel were a different matter. At the northern end of Callis Street, outside the house of the sheriff, the crowd was silent and gripped by the horror on the stage. Even the oxen stood rooted to the spot as the first murderer in the world went through his paces.

  ‘Arrest him, my lord!’ one of the crowd shouted to old Gower, sitting on his balcony like a gargoyle.

  There was a roar of terror as Cain struck home, a butcher’s cleaver flashing in the morning sun and genuine pig’s blood spraying the audience. Children were crying and Cain was lucky to get off the stage alive, even when the slaughtered Abel got up and bowed to the audience in an attempt to diffuse the situation.

  Glanville was near enough now to Visconti to hear what he was saying to the girl. In his borrowed finery, in the pressing crowd and with the lad clearly smitten with his unexpected companion, the knight thought it was probably safe to get closer. Visconti was leaning close to her and explaining, in his less-than-perfect English, that this was an allegory. The girl had no idea what that was in her own tongue, let alone Italian. She was altogether happier, however, as the Saviour came into the world in the churchyard of St Peter and St Paul, the crowd pleased to leave the dismal scene of fraternal carnage. No one was happier on that occasion than Cain, who peered out from the curtains of his wagon’s lower tier, glad to be alive.

  The drums and tabours and shawms that had thudded and rattled and jarred in Glanville’s ears all morning were suddenly distant and peace came to Clare. The lads of the choir, hair brushed and cassocks gleaming, gave forth over the rooftops, their treble voices bringing fresh purity to the glory of the psalms. The devils in the crowd, all black leather with horns and forked tails, slunk away from the glow from the church porch. Shepherds trooped up the slope as the crowd sat irreverently on the tombstones and three kings came from the east of the town, dripping with jewels made of finest paste.

  The girl with Visconti stood wide-eyed and open-mouthed as the magi knelt before the boy-king in his manger. The child was a stuffed doll, because even the best-behaved infant could not be trusted to play the part that well. Mary and Joseph were a real-life couple from the south of the country and the mothers in the crowd oohed and aahed as the little hunted family sat divinely among the donkey shit.

  William Aske of the Goldsmiths’ Guild placed his gift before the little Jesus and bowed to kiss the straw. His was a present befitting a king of all the world. Then came Alban the apothecary, with his phial of frankincense, the essence of divinity. Finally, as if his camel had been playing up outside, Roger his assistant bowed before his young Lord. ‘Mine is myrrh,’ the crowd heard him say. ‘Gathering gloom is bound up in its bitter perfume.’ And Hector Bazalgette, who owned the town’s spice shop, beamed with pride, telling everybody that both these exquisite perfumes were available at surprisingly reasonable prices in his emporium.

  With a final ‘aah’, Visconti and his girl jostled through the crowd to the increasingly frenzied rhythm of viols and shawms. Alban the apothecary watched them go, a gleam in his eye. There was always a bit of a spike in sales of sundry mercury and other goods after the pageants; he almost rubbed his hands together, then thought twice – he took his role as Second Magus very seriously.

  Word was spreading that the Guild of Plumbers was putting on The Woman Taken in Adultery and that, mysteriously, Bob Whitlow of the Haberdashers’ Guild was starring in that one. Every year, the plumbers thought long and hard about changing their Bible story but every year, the woman and her adultery won the day. Once upon a time, there had been a good reason given for it having anything to do with plumbing, but it had been forgotten long ago. And now Bob Whitlow was of the company, the costumes, where worn, were the best in the entire pageant.

  As the festivities and the drinking went on, it became increasingly difficult for Glanville to keep his quarry in sight. The boy was cuddling the girl now and kissing her, oblivious to Judas hanging himself from a tree and the dragons and gryphons belching fire dangerously near to the straw and timber, dry in the long spring days. The nuns of the priory were tripping daintily around the maypole, blissfully ignorant of the fact that it was the Devil’s pizzle.

  Then, it was midday by the tolling of the priory bells and never was a knight more grateful to see the sign of the cockatrice swinging over the swaying crowd. Chaucer was there already, less red in the face than Richard Glanville.

  ‘Well?’ he asked the knight.

  ‘As well as can be expected,’ Glanville told him. ‘A few clouts to the shin, elbows in the ribs, the usual pageant crush.’

  ‘No, I mean, what news of Visconti? What’s he been up to?’

  ‘I don’t know her name,’ the knight said, nodding in their direction. ‘But he’s certainly giving her his full attention.’

  ‘Is that it?’ Chaucer frowned. ‘All morning?’

  ‘Love’s young dream, I suppose,’ Glanville said. ‘And I think you were right; the Italian boy isn’t our man. Or else today he is not in the killing vein. Didn’t seem remotely interested when Cain slew Abel. Incidentally, Geoffrey, you seem to be clutching a lamb to your chest.’

  Chaucer looked down as though previously unaware of the fact. Beyond the shepherd’s smock with its Suffolk weave, the lamb, with its glass eyes and its leather nose looked meekly up at Richard Glanville, who looked solemnly back. ‘It’s all about disguising and mumming, Richard,’ he said, reaching out through his side placket to reach his ale and take a sip. ‘If I’m wrong about Visconti, then God help all of us. Our killer could be any one of these people,’ he pointed to the tumblers in their reds and whites and greens, the wild men in their leaves, the music-makers in their caps and bells, the devils winding through it all. ‘And we chose this day, of all days, to catch him.’

  Glanville, tired to his bones with the sound of shawms and voices, drained his ale, patted the lamb and left, heading for the peace of the castle and an afternoon’s lie-down.

  THIRTEEN

  Chaucer had noticed before that a man with a lamb clutched to his chest becomes more or less invisible, especially in a crowd of other people dressed in unexpected costumes. A few of the shepherds from the Nativity scene were wandering around and almost unconsciously welcomed him as a brother. It was easy to sit almost next to Giovanni Visconti and his new light o’ love, without drawing undue attention, and he listened in, to see if he could hear anything to his advantage.

  In the excitement of having a pretty girl on his arm and being away from the strict gaze of his sister, her seneschal and various masters at arms, and also being under the influence of a large volume of sundry alcoholic drinks, Visconti was becoming both voluble and more Italian by the minute. Chaucer watched him carefully but knew that the difference between a man on the verge of an alcoholic stupor and a man who is pretending to be on the verge of an alcoholic stupor is but a hair’s-breadth. Chaucer had no idea whether Giovanni Visconti harboured any histrionic talents, so for the moment his judgement was reserved. But he could see, because the girl was not drinking at all, the predatory gleam in her eye. If they could find any privacy, this could be the day when a boy, murderer or not, became a man.

  He had not been eavesdropping for long, when the cry rose up for ‘Queck!’ and anyone in the inn who still retained the power of movement rushed outside in a body, Visconti and his paramour well to the front. Chaucer shook his head. This ridiculous game had hovered in the air like a ghost ever since his arrival at Clare. The guildsmen had threatened him with it from the beginning and, to his horror, he saw young Visconti being drawn into the nonsense in the square. The great wagons had moved on now, ready to lumber up the hill to the castle for the evening’s festivities, and the square was full of tables laid end to end with square, chequered boards on them. The crowd was thickest at the far end, where the self-appointed Queck Mast
er, David Ifaywer, sat nodding his approval at the mob’s adulation and flexing his fingers as he prepared to play. He still wore his Noah robes, but had taken off his beard and tucked it into his belt to don again later – nothing must be allowed to interfere with his game. He wore the air of the Man To Beat.

  The girl with Visconti pushed him into a seat and stood at his shoulder, playing with his curls and whispering encouragement and other things which made him blush.

  ‘Let the tournament commence!’ Ifaywer roared and the trumpeter’s fanfare was all but drowned by the crowd, jostling and pushing as the contestants faced each other in the knock-out trials. One by one, underscored by the sound of clicking quecks, the weaker players fell by the wayside, until only the Italian and the carpenter were left. The boy had already found to his delight when playing the game with Lionel of Antwerp that queck was almost exactly the same, except in a few minor plays unknown to these yokels, as Gomitate, which had been all the rage in Milano the year before he had joined Violante at her new home in Clare. Soon he had become more than a little flushed with the English ale and success, the girl enjoying every minute as her new beau was lauded by all and sundry. Then, Visconti faced Ifaywer and it was suddenly all over. The lad took it in good part and shook the carpenter’s hand. Even defeat had its compensation; the girl was all over him.

  ‘Master Chaucer!’ Ifaywer recognized the shepherd and his lamb in the crowd. ‘I promised you a match.’

  ‘No, I …’ Chaucer shook his head. He couldn’t lose Visconti now; there was no telling which way he would go as the afternoon wore on. The crowd all but lifted Chaucer off his feet and plonked him down opposite the Queck Master. He could see that Visconti was still there, watching the outcome, his arm around the girl. All was well … so far.