The Knight's Tale

by M. J. Trow

  The girl suddenly burst into tears and Chaucer didn’t know where to put his hands, always assuming he could free them from his smock in time. ‘There, there,’ he said. ‘Where is he?’

  ‘I don’t know!’ she wailed. ‘And I don’t care. He had his wicked way with me in his room … those Italians are only after one thing, aren’t they? He done that and then he kicked me out. Probably chasing a trollop somewhere. Well, he’s dead to me now.’

  Chaucer’s ingratiating smile vanished. He dashed away, making for the Confessor Tower where he knew the boy’s chambers were. On his way, he half-turned, staggering a little as his lamb spoiled his balance. ‘If it’s any consolation,’ he called to the girl, ‘May is an unlucky month for marriages.’ And the girl burst into tears again.

  The comptroller found himself running, not his usual habit. A cold sense of dread had gripped him and he had to find Visconti quickly. He skirted the Lion Tower with its ghastly memories and dodged past three devils, roaring drunk and trying to catch their own tails. A little girl, who had been a shepherdess in Bethlehem earlier in the day, ran past him in the opposite direction, dragging the stuffed rag that was the baby Jesus behind her.

  ‘Seen him?’ Richard Glanville nearly collided with the comptroller at the foot of the stairs.

  ‘No,’ Chaucer said, ‘but he’s ditched the girl he was with. I’m trying his rooms.’

  ‘I’ll come with you.’

  ‘Pa?’ Hugh hurtled round the corner, out of breath and sweating. ‘Any sign? I lost him at the—’

  ‘We’re trying his rooms,’ the knight shouted.

  ‘Hugh,’ Chaucer shouted as he ran, ‘try the Great Hall. If we’re wrong, he might be there.’

  The squire ducked back the way he had come as the others struggled up the spiral twist. Visconti’s door was shut and all seemed quiet. Chaucer put his ear to the oak and didn’t like the sound he heard. He knew he’d regret it but he put his shoulder to the door anyway and all but fell into the room.

  Giovanni Visconti lay writhing on the bed, gasping for breath. There was a garland of flowers still at a rakish angle on his head and his doublet was undone, as were the points of his hose. His face was a ghastly white and milky saliva dribbled down his chin.

  ‘Hemlock,’ Chaucer shouted and rammed two fingers into the boy’s mouth. He vomited immediately, but his eyes still rolled in his head and he wasn’t responding. ‘Giovanni.’ Chaucer held the boy’s face between his hands. ‘Listen to me. Focus. Here.’ He shook the boy’s head, but the eyes were glazed. ‘Giovanni! What have you eaten?’ Chaucer tried to keep his voice calm, hard though it was. ‘Who gave you food? Wine? Have you drunk anything recently?’

  The comptroller knew what futile questions they were. The Italian had probably been eating and drinking all day and Chaucer had no idea how long hemlock took to work.

  ‘Rich,’ he looked up at the knight. ‘Fetch Violante.’ He looked back at the lad, who was snatching at breaths far too far apart for his liking. ‘He hasn’t got long.’

  The knight dashed away along the passageway. The Lady Violante was probably still in her chamber, resting. Chaucer tried the two-finger technique again, but this time, the boy didn’t react at all. The comptroller fumbled with the lad’s wrist. He couldn’t feel a pulse. He pressed his ear to his chest. Nothing. Finally, he put his cheek against the boy’s nose and mouth. There was no breath. He had gone.

  A scream shattered the moment. Violante looked as if Hellmouth had yawned before her. Her dark eyes were wide and staring, her mouth working in silent shock. Behind her, Ferrante stood stony-faced, the perfect servant, reduced to silence like his mistress. She stumbled forward and Chaucer moved aside. The Duchess of Clarence, widowed, bereft of her husband, had now lost her little brother too. As realization dawned, she suddenly felt very afraid and very alone.

  ‘Stanno cercando di ucciderci tutti?’ She looked up at Ferrante, with tears trickling down her cheeks and her voice trembling.

  ‘What?’ Glanville said to Ferrante. ‘What did she say?’

  ‘She wonders, Sir Richard,’ the seneschal said, ‘whether you intend to kill us all. All us Italians.’

  ‘What?’ Glanville was speechless. If a man had said that, whatever the circumstances, he would have felled him where he stood.

  ‘It’s the grief talking,’ Chaucer said. ‘Ferrante, find a priest, will you? The last rites?’

  The seneschal nodded and turned to go.

  ‘Richard,’ Violante held out her hand and the knight helped her up, away from the young body that suddenly looked so small and helpless. Glanville held her close, her hand to his chest, and she raised her face to his. Neither of them was quite themselves at that moment and they kissed, their lips touching softly in the midst of grief and shock.

  Chaucer didn’t know exactly what to make of it, but there were things to be done. ‘Ferrante!’ he snapped. ‘The priest, man. Get on with it.’

  ‘Signore,’ and the seneschal was gone.

  Chaucer couldn’t see Violante’s face. It was pressed against the strongest, safest chest that the comptroller had known. Whatever was happening here at Clare, it was easily the best place for her to be. Glanville, with the strength of ten and the touch of swansdown, led the lady away, leaving Chaucer alone with death.

  Chaucer was no stranger to death; the battlefield ones were hard – the beardless boys the French called the Goddamns – but he had been with both his parents when they shuffled off the mortal coil and he had found it strangely comforting, to see the years fall away, the worries, the stresses and strains. They had led exciting lives, one way and another and Chaucer smiled at the memory of it. How many men alive today, for example, could say that his father had been kidnapped to secure the family inheritance? He had escaped that fate worse than death and had married his Agnes, an heiress far richer than he was; Chaucer had wanted for little in his childhood except for the loving touch of his mother’s hand. He had gone to Clare when a boy and had never lived at his parents’ home again. He looked down at the face of Giovanni Visconti, smoothing out now in death, another beardless boy far from home. Chaucer had closed his eyes and straightened his limbs just as his sister had entered the room, a loving touch that no one had noticed, but had he done this kind thing for a murderer? They might never find out. Hearing a noise behind him, he turned, breaking away from his thoughts.

  ‘Queck Master?’ It was the arbiter Dominican from the afternoon’s game who stood at the door.

  ‘You get around, Father,’ Chaucer commented; perhaps it was not the most charitable comment.

  ‘Just enjoying a little cuckoo-ale when the Italian seneschal stopped me. Apparently, there’s been a … Oh, Holy Mother of God!’ He saw Visconti’s body, and crossed himself. Despite Chaucer’s limited ministrations, it was still clearly not the corpse of a man who had died quietly in his sleep. ‘What happened here?’

  ‘I could speculate until Domesday, Father,’ Chaucer said, ‘but let’s keep it simple and say a man is dead. I can leave his soul with you, I trust?’

  ‘You can,’ the monk said, and went about his ministrations. He shook the holy water over the dead boy’s head, holding his rosary beads in his other hand. He turned to Chaucer as the comptroller stood to leave. ‘Did he die in sin?’ he asked.

  Chaucer shrugged. ‘Don’t we all?’ he asked.

  ‘When was his last confession?’ the monk enquired. ‘It would help if I knew.’

  ‘Well, I’m afraid I don’t,’ Chaucer said. ‘His confessor died only this last week.’

  The monk frowned. He had heard things, of course, but still. ‘I will assume the worst, then,’ he said, with the same dispassionate delivery he had brought to the game of queck. He turned again to the bed and lowered his head. ‘In nomine patri …’

  But Chaucer had gone, hurtling along the passageway, pushing the lamb as far to one side as it would go, hearing some of Moderata’s careful stitching finally giving up the ghost. From a silent room o
f death and torment, the comptroller emerged into a wild party. The fireworks were still exploding overhead and the castle guard were handling their fire sticks and mortars with consummate skill or sheer luck or both. No one had burned to death in the Clare Pageant for the best part of seventy years. A group whom Chaucer recognized vaguely as Noah’s family from earlier in the day, now augmented by the absent Japhet, stumbled past him, laughing and hooting.

  ‘Yeah,’ one of them called out to somebody else. ‘We was in a float, yeah? Get it? Noah? Flood? Float?’ He caught Chaucer’s eye and shrugged. ‘God, I’m wasted here.’

  In more ways than one, Chaucer thought. In this sea of faces, with masks of every colour, feathers and furs, sackcloth and ashes, stalked a murderer. And he was fresh from a kill. The comptroller collided with someone he thought he knew.

  ‘Master Chaucer!’ It was Andrew Trumpington, the cordwainer of the Guild of St Peter. ‘I hear you trounced old Ifaywer today.’ He shook Chaucer’s hand. ‘Good for you.’ He looked closer. ‘Are you well, Master Chaucer? Your hand feels …’

  Chaucer released his left hand from his smock and waved it at the cordwainer. He was beginning to wish he had asked Moderata to make the lamb easier to remove. But then, he hadn’t expected today to work out quite the way it had.

  ‘Did you see my devils, Master Chaucer?’ Trumpington asked, reassured that Chaucer wasn’t dying of some strange stiffening disease. ‘Their costumes are all my own work.’

  ‘Excellent,’ Chaucer said, one eye still on the crowd. ‘Tell me, did you also do the costume for Death?’

  Trumpington laughed. ‘Which one? Death’s a popular character at the Clare Pageant. I know I’ve seen at least three tonight, not counting the one with Lazarus. His scythe fell to bits before the judging and he’s lost the stomach for it.’ Trumpington looked around, trying to be helpful, waving to people he knew in the crowd. ‘Look!’ He grabbed Chaucer’s real arm. ‘There’s one … oh, no, my mistake. It’s just daft old Hubert.’

  ‘Anyway,’ Chaucer said, as if he had stopped Trumpington, rather than the other way around. ‘Don’t let me keep you.’ And he walked off, still looking right and left. There were faces everywhere, some familiar, most not. All of Suffolk seemed to have crowded into the castle of Clare, letting down their collective hair now that summer was almost here and the world had turned. But there was one face which stayed oddly in Chaucer’s mind. He had seen it often in the past weeks, but tonight he had seen it in a different light. There had been something about the eyes that had rattled him, a cold stare of contempt that had made the hairs on his neck prickle and meant that, for just a moment, he’d forgotten to breathe.

  Chaucer glanced up to the high window in the Confessor’s Tower and saw a solitary candle flickering there – the Dominican was lighting young Visconti’s way to God. A breath of wind hissed past him, a dark shadow in funereal black, and it vanished behind the inner wall of the barbican. The comptroller was caught in a dilemma now. He needed all the help he could get, but Hugh had disappeared like a will o’ the wisp. Richard Glanville would still be comforting Violante. And when it came to it, those were the only two whom Chaucer could truly trust. Or could he?

  He ducked under an archway along from the Nethergate and all but fell over a couple writhing together against the stonework. The man half-turned with a snarl. ‘Do you mind?’

  ‘Sorry, Master Whitlow,’ and Chaucer retreated, leaving the haberdasher alone with the woman taken in adultery, typecast as ever.

  ‘Ooh, this stone’s cold,’ he heard her squeal as he ran for the steps to the keep. It was no good; he had to find a Glanville of one generation or another. And quickly.

  ‘Where’s Hugh?’ As if by magic, the knight was forcing his way through the throng of laundresses, emboldened by their new-found popularity and their windfalls. Some of them went so far as to clutch at Glanville’s silken sleeves, but he didn’t even seem to notice them.

  ‘I hoped you’d tell me,’ Chaucer said. ‘How’s Violante?’

  ‘Lying down,’ Glanville told him. ‘I left her with her ladies. She’ll be all right soon. The Italian in her will kick in and it’ll be time for the flying furniture. Um … look, Geoff … what you may have witnessed …’ The knight was shifting his weight from foot to foot and looked down, embarrassed as a lad of fifteen. ‘I mean, you mustn’t read into it …’

  Chaucer smiled. In some ways, there was nothing more gratifying than watching an old friend squirm. He patted Glanville’s arm. ‘If you’re apologizing for loving a lovely woman,’ he said, ‘don’t. We’ve all had our moments.’ And as if on cue, Joyce swung past and winked at him.

  ‘What do we do now?’ Glanville asked out of the corner of his mouth.

  The comptroller would have liked to have lain down on a feather bed and covered his head with a pillow until all this madness had gone away, but that didn’t seem a likely option. Again, the black shape he had felt at his elbow all night flitted into his gaze. It was a cloak, not even that, the whisper of a cloak, vanishing up spiral stairs like smoke up a chimney. Daft old Hubert it most certainly was not.

  ‘Who had access to Visconti’s rooms?’ Glanville was still trying to apply what logic he could muster.

  ‘Not relevant.’ Chaucer shook his head. ‘Whatever the boy swallowed, he got it outside – in the town, in the castle – I don’t know. The last time I saw the girl he was with, she seemed all right. A bit disconsolate, perhaps, but not gagging on poison. So we have to assume that only Giovanni partook of something nasty.’

  ‘You’re the mouse-smeller,’ Glanville said. ‘Try the kitchens. Stick your nose into a few pots.’

  Chaucer blew an outward breath. Even if that worked, it was pointless. In theory, anyone had access to the kitchens, especially when Butterfield and Ferrante had turned their backs. Even so, it might yield results and was better than rushing around Clare in circles, fighting his way through an army of drunks.

  ‘Where will you be?’ he asked the knight. He didn’t want to have to try to find him in this melee again.

  ‘Looking for Hugh,’ Glanville said. ‘For a start, I want to give him this wretched outfit back.’ Chaucer couldn’t help but notice that the knight had unlaced his doublet completely and it hung indecorously from both arms. ‘Give me a few minutes. Meet me at the chapel entrance and we’ll put some sort of plan together. One thing, Geoffrey …’

  Chaucer waited for it.

  ‘No one else dies tonight. Is that understood?’

  It was understood by Geoffrey Chaucer, Comptroller of the King’s Woollens. But would that be good enough?

  He was making his way to the kitchens where the scullions, all sweaty and crimson in the heat of the fires, were at that horrible stage of any busy night, when the dishes still going out and the dirty dishes coming in collide. He was almost there when a surly looking carpenter accosted him. ‘I want a rematch, Master Chaucer,’ Ifaywer said.

  ‘Not now, Master Carpenter,’ Chaucer moved the man to one side. He had no intention of playing queck ever again; life was just too short. Around the corner, he collided with Simon Fawcett of the Corpus Christi Guild, who grabbed Chaucer’s smock collar and bumped his own paunch against the lamb.

  ‘Stocks,’ the tapicer slurred. ‘You were going to put us all in the stocks.’

  ‘Was I?’ Chaucer frowned. Suddenly, that all seemed to be a long time ago.

  ‘Well, I don’t see any sign of it.’ Fawcett breathed ale all over him. ‘I was having a laugh with old Sheriff Gower earlier and he didn’t mention it. He didn’t mention it at all.’

  ‘Lovely,’ Chaucer smiled. ‘Now, another time, Master Fawcett. I’m a little busy just now.’

  ‘It’s all your fault, you know …’ Fawcett was in full flow, bemoaning his lot in life. He’d fallen off his wagon earlier in the day and – from the look on his face – he was doing it again.

  Chaucer knew that, but he hadn’t time to argue the toss. Behind the tapicer, he saw the sha
dow swirl through an archway, making for the chapel. The fireworks burst suddenly in a riot of lights overhead and the crowd oohed as they’d been doing now ever since darkness fell. With no moon, their light was all the brighter and the sparks seemed to hang in the warm spring air like stars. Chaucer looked at Fawcett, who was desperately trying to make his eyes move in the same direction as each other. He brought his knee up under the lamb and felt it thud into the tapicer’s crotch. The man groaned and went down. Chaucer beamed briefly; he had wanted to do that to somebody all day – and if it was a guildsman who got in the way, so much the better.

  The dark shape was ahead of him now. He had seen it on the battlements as he came back from the town, vague, ill-formed, unreal. He had seen it on and off all night, flitting around corners like a spectral crow, black, sharp and frightening. And it was making for the chapel where Chaucer had promised to meet Richard Glanville. His hopeless quest for answers in the kitchens forgotten, he turned the corner, just remembering to duck in time as the steps went down to the chapel door.

  There was a groan from the floor and a candle lay on its side on the flags, still alight and throwing jangling shadows onto the wall, making it hard at first for the comptroller to work out what it was he saw. Richard Glanville lay there, blood oozing from his son’s doublet, dark crimson besmottering the satin.

  ‘Rich!’ Chaucer knelt, despite his knees and the ever-present lamb, and cradled the man’s head.

  ‘It’s all right,’ the knight croaked. ‘I’ve had worse cutting myself shaving.’ He tried to laugh but it didn’t work too well, making him cough and double up in pain. His eyes rolled up into his head and he took one enormous breath and then – for what seemed to Chaucer an age – finally he exhaled again and his eyes flickered back to look into the distance. He raised his arm as best he could and pointed to the stairs. ‘There!’ he wheezed. ‘There! After him! Go on!’

  There was no dilemma now. Richard Glanville was a survivor. He had come through more wars than Geoffrey Chaucer had had hot dinners and, if he said it would be all right, it would be all right. And Chaucer sensed that this was the last chance he’d have to bring a murderer to book.