The Clerkenwell Tales Page 3

  “Be of good heart. It is the veil.”

  When he was a carpenter’s apprentice, Marrow had been mightily impressed by the news that Christ himself had been a carpenter; he was of a naturally pious disposition and, having learned his ABC at the free school of the local abbess, picked up what scraps of learning in English he could find. He was a reflective man, not much given to speech, but he did converse on spiritual matters with William Exmewe. They had met while Marrow was repairing two side tables in the refectory of St. Bartholomew, where Exmewe had been kitchener before he was elected sub-prior, and they had soon reached agreement on the nature of Christ’s example.

  Now they came out of Duck Lane close by Aldersgate, where the city ditch was used as a privy. This was against the law and custom of the city, which enjoined strict rules of cleanliness upon its citizens; but in the words of the mayor, the goldsmith Drew Barrantyne, “human nature feels its way through filth and folly.” The phrase had been repeated about the streets until it turned into a popular refrain. Eventually it became part of one of the “London songs” which filled the air for several days, or weeks, before disappearing. Some wooden shops and dwellings had been erected between the ditch and the wall itself, with a few planks laid down as a bridge to reach them, and Exmewe pointed out a small shed. It was painted in Naples green. “This is where you will find it,” he said to Marrow. “This is where your fire will be. You will take it to the oratory. Over there. In the street of St. John.” At the bottom of Aldersgate, standing just in front of the gate itself, a blind man and blind woman were holding slender white willow wands and singing in unison, “Ora! Ora! Ora! Pro nobis!”

  Exmewe was staring at Marrow. “Why do you say nothing?” He had suddenly grown angry. “Do you hesitate in this high purpose? Listen, Marrow. Our work will be as hard as hell. Do you know that? Do you?”

  They passed through the gate in silence and entered the city. They were in the street called St. Martin, with its row of four-storey houses on either side. In front of them some stew was being boiled in a cauldron on a bowl of coals, and an ancient woman skimmed off its fat with a perforated spoon. A tooth-drawer, with a wreath of teeth draped over his shoulders, passed them and then looked back with an expression of delight as he loitered among the street-stalls piled high with garlic and wheat, cheese and poultry. The late rains had left the street reeking of night-old vegetables and piss. Exmewe was still filled with this mysterious and unexpected anger. It might have been the anger of God, unfathomable. “Do you hear this chatter of humankind?” he shouted to Marrow above the press of people and of horses. “God has gone deaf!”

  He stumbled over a long cart that was being drawn through the street, and the porter yelled at him, “Rouse your eyes, man! Do you not see?”

  Yes, he did see. He saw the tooth-drawer walking back towards them and approaching Marrow. The carpenter was looking into the musical instrument shop.

  “May I see your face, sir?”

  “Why so?” Marrow asked him.

  “Curiosity. I love teeth.”

  Marrow raised his leather hood, and the tooth-drawer sighed. “Yes. I know you. I have seen you with the Lollards in Coleman Street.” The drawer looked around, seeking for witnesses, and Marrow swiftly stepped into the shadow of the shop’s sign. “Loller!” The drawer pointed at him. “False Loller!”

  At that moment someone hurled himself against the drawer. He smashed his raised arm savagely against the drawer’s face. Hamo Fulberd had come to save Marrow.

  The drawer fell back, concussed, and collapsed into the gitterns and fiddles, the trumpets and tabors, which were suspended from the ceiling of the shop. There was a noise of twanging instruments as Hamo kicked the head of the prostrate man. At the first sign of violence people ran eagerly across the street, ready to use violence themselves, but Marrow remained calm.

  “Run, Hamo,” he whispered and then called out in a loud voice. “God be here!” He pointed to the tooth-drawer. “This man is a Loller.”

  At once there was cry of “Stock him! Stock him!”

  William Exmewe had already vanished, and in turn Hamo made his way quickly down Bladder Street. A child in a leather cap and long coat stared at him, and then ran up some outside steps to a first-floor chamber. Exmewe had often told Hamo that London was no more than a veil, a pageant cloth, which must be torn asunder to see the face of Christ shining. But at times like this the city seemed real enough. The child was calling out to someone. Hamo turned the corner of Paternoster Row, into the street of the illuminators and parchment-makers whose work was displayed all around him. He glimpsed a saint holding up his arms in ecstasy while, at the bottom of the page, an ape clambered among vines. Here was an image of the Virgin, but in the margins there were geese and dogs and foxes. There was a song sheet entitled Mysteria tremenda.

  Exmewe had walked along St. Anne Lane and turned right into Forster Lane; after the events of the morning, he had a sudden desire for meat. His anger had quickened his appetite. He was angry because in part he despised himself. What was the phrase? You cannot have two heads under one hood. He began to crave thrushes, pies, sows’ feet, anything. Yet he must take care. Always take care. He was aware that he had a tendency to melancholy, and so he refrained from fried meat and from meat which was over-salted. Of course boiled meat was better for melancholy men than roast meat, but in particular he avoided the taste of venison; the deer is a beast that lives in fear, and fear only increases the melancholy humour. If he had eaten venison, he would have fled all the sooner from Aldersgate. There was a cookshop close by, where journeymen and labourers ate their boiled mutton bones and penny ale. There would be much talk and much wind; the air would be mightily corrupted.

  There were occasions when he enjoyed such close-smelling company, however, just as he enjoyed listening to the sins of the poor. It was the smell of humankind, and those who lived in the city had become accustomed to it. There were even those who welcomed human odour and would seek it out in unwholesome places – they were known as “snufflers,” and would haunt privies or open jakes for their pleasure. They would follow those citizens who possessed a particular or pungent smell, until they were filled with the evil scent. Exmewe approached the door of the cookshop but the noise and confusion within, like the clattering of a mill, drove him back. Someone was singing “My love has fared inland.” He could not eat with this company. Instead he stopped at a roasting-stall and bought two finches for a penny, tossing their small and fragile bones into the middle of the street as he walked westward towards Newgate.

  Richard Marrow left the tooth-drawer to the mercy of the people, and managed to make his way down St. Martin into Old Change. There was much building work here, in the precincts of Paul’s, and the street was filled with cries of “Yous!” and “Yis!” and “Hoo!” The builders’ carts were pulled by horses or by mastiff-hounds, and the labourers played football or sang over their cups in their brief if frequent intervals of rest. It was the way of London.

  When Marrow turned from their shouts and cries into Maidenhead Lane, he was in his own familiar neighbourhood. He was known here as “Long Richard,” or “Long Dicoun.” No one knew of his association with William Exmewe, but he was generally considered to be “touched” or “blessed” by some unworldly spirit. He showed no respect towards the rich or the high-born, for example, and never murmured “God save you” when he met them; he never bowed before them or hid his hands in his sleeve or took off his cap before speaking. He was often chided for his behaviour by his neighbours, who were concerned for the reputation of their ward, but on more than one occasion he had replied that “I would rather eat worms in the wood than bow to their folly.” When asked about his tattered clothes he told the story of the peacock who in the deep of night, when he could not see himself, cried because he thought he had lost his beauty. When asked if he knew how his conduct threatened the order of the city, he asked “if the pissing of a wren can disturb the sea?” “Besides,” he would remark, “I
am too long to stoop low.” By the more pious inhabitants of the ward he was compared to a cross that stands in the street, showing men the way.

  By the evening, Hamo Fulberd had returned to St. Bartholomew. He lived in a small stone barn erected in a corner of the churchyard, by the outside wall; he slept here, upon a plank covered with straw, with the tools of his trade arranged neatly on a low table beneath the window. He drew comfort from the silent presence of these familiar objects – the hair brushes, the pencils, the earthenware bowls and the glass phials. There were no woollen blankets here, no tapestries or cushions; all was as plain as the barn itself, except that the floor was of earth and turf like the rest of the churchyard in which it stood. He sat down upon his stool, and began to work upon a parchment which he had been given by his teacher, Father Matthew, as a reward for his assiduousness. He was drawing an image of the Three Living and Three Dead. The living ones held scrolls, on which their oaths were written. “By God’s bones that was good ale” and “By the feet of Christ I will beat you at the dice” were complemented with “By God’s heart I will go to town.” Hamo was erasing part of a badly drawn figure, rubbing it with the skin of a stockfish, when Exmewe quietly entered the barn. “This is a brittle world, Hamo.” He stood behind the boy’s shoulder, peering down at his work. “A cold world.”

  “This is a cold night.”

  “There is a city of janglers, and a city of God. That man belonged to the janglers.”

  “The tooth man?”

  “His dwelling is now in hell.”

  “Are you telling me that he is dead?”

  Exmewe put his hands upon Hamo’s shoulders. “There is no shorter way.” Hamo would never have guessed, or suspected, that Exmewe was lying to him. The tooth-drawer lived, and was even then repeating the story of his attack in a tavern called the Running Pie-Man. “His body has been recovered and now lies in the Barber Surgeons’ Hall for the greater glory of his profession. We must keep you close and secret until he is buried.”

  Hamo rocked upon his stool. “Why? Why do I not belong to the play of the good people?”

  “What good people? The world is thick with thieves.” Exmewe felt the strangest sensation of pity. “Do not lose heart. Your best friend is still alive.”

  “Who?”

  “You.”

  Hamo cried, and then laughed aloud, at this. “So I am as alone as I was born.”

  “You are not alone. You are part of the kingdom of the blessed.”

  Hamo had listened when Exmewe had expounded to Marrow the secret religion. He had listened incredulously when the friar had told the carpenter that Christ had not voluntarily gone to the sacrifice of the Cross, but had been a victim of a “coivin” or conspiracy between the two other members of the Trinity. He had heard, too, their debates about the nature of destiny and providence. “So what comes, comes by destiny,” Marrow had said.

  Hamo remembered this now, as he sat upon his stool with the stockfish in his hand, and questioned Exmewe. “So all is foretold by providence?” It was a comparatively new debate, instigated by the theologians of Oxford. In recent years many people had been driven to despair by the idea that they were foredoomed, and that nothing in the world could avert the fate that was awaiting them. There were some who flagellated themselves as a preparation for the punishment to come. It had become so serious a problem among the clergy, for example, that a papal encyclical had been issued against the sin of wanhope. The notion of providence, and of the timelessness of God, induced feelings of helplessness and lassitude. And yet for others the same doctrine was a cause of celebration; they did not feel responsible for their actions, and as a result could sin without remorse. The choice of heaven and hell was beyond them, entirely out of their control, and therefore they could act – or refrain from acting – with impunity.

  “Did I destroy the tooth-drawer by providence or by destiny?”

  “All will be well.”

  “Will it?”

  “Do not walk or ride outside Bartholomew without my express commandment.”

  Exmewe left him then, and Hamo Fulberd continued work upon the parchment. Then quite suddenly he put his head upon it and began to weep, calling upon the unspeakable mercy of God.

  Chapter Three

  The Merchant’s Tale

  The hour before dawn had come quietly into St. John’s Street. A pig wandered down Pissing Alley, having escaped the attentions of the night warden, and from one of the many small tenements along the street came the sound of a baby crying. The haberdasher, Radulf Strago, was about to leave the bed while his wife was still sleeping. He had suffered a bad dream, in which he had said to his mother, “I will give you two yards of linen cloth in which to wrap your body when you are hanged.” Even at the time he knew that she had died peacefully, some three years before, from a surfeit of strawberries. In his dream there had begun to fall great flakes of snow, as if they had been locks of wool. He had been trying to knock them away with the flip-flap used to swat flies, but the wool then turned into pieces of frieze cloth and broad cloth. He had awoken in a sweat but, as a practical man whose thoughts were already forming around the business of the day, he dismissed these visions as fantasies. The cramp or flux in his stomach was still there; he had trusted himself to shit it out, but it remained like a hard knot within his body.

  He blessed himself and rose from his bed; with a groan he crept over to a small wooden table where he combed his hair before washing his face and hands in a basin of water. He was still naked but he slipped on a linen shift before kneeling on the floor for his pater noster and credo. Then he sat down upon the side of the bed and, muttering a litany to the Mother of God, he drew on a pair of short woollen socks and some woollen hose striped in blue and mustard yellow. There was no need for a doublet on this spring morning, and so he put on a simple jacket of blue serge cloth; he whispered the invocation “Memento, Domine,” so as not to disturb his wife, as he donned his green tunic and scarlet hood. I have prayed faithfully, he said under his breath, so the Lord send me good profit. He slipped on his pointed red shoes, fashioned out of the finest leather, and laced them carefully before walking down the wooden stairs to the solar below. His apprentice was sleeping on a pallet, and he roused him with a “Torolly-lolly, Janekin. It is the spring time of the world.”

  Radulf Strago, at the age of fifty-seven, might have been considered to be in his declining time; but he had married a much younger woman two years before, and had reason to consider himself blessed. It is true that he had been sore and sick in recent weeks; he had cause to vomit every day, and his stools were as loose as running water. He sometimes feared that he had a cancer or imposthume, but he tried to dismiss these symptoms as part of his sanguinary complexion. A change in the aspect of the stars would change everything. His business continued to flourish, in any case, situated as it was between the priory and the city; St. John’s Street itself led directly to the gate of the priory of St. John of Jerusalem, and many visitors passed Strago’s door. All the travellers to Smithfield came this way, too, in search of hats and shoelaces, combs and linen thread.

  The shop itself was on the ground floor facing the street and, without waiting for Janekin, he descended; he unlocked the wooden shutters and unfolded the counter. He opened the door, too, and breathed in the air of dawn. The rays of the sun touched the painted cloths and the children’s purses, the whistles and wooden boxes, the beads and parchment skins, solemn and still in the early morning. Then the bells began to ring, and the street itself seemed to know that it must awaken.

  At the top of the stairs Janekin coughed and spat; he muttered some oath, unintelligible, to which Radulf replied, “God give you good day!”

  The evening before Janekin had been engaged in a battle of words with the young citizens who supported Henry, duke of Lancaster, in his struggle with King Richard. Janekin was of the king’s party, and wore a pewter badge of the white hart in his tall hat of felt. John of Gaunt, father of Henry, had died seven we
eks before. Now King Richard had revoked Henry’s inheritance, keeping the Lancastrian legacy for his own use, and had consigned Henry to perpetual banishment. Whereupon some Lancastrian supporters had rioted through the streets, overturning barrels and breaking down signs.

  Janekin had been watching them at the corner of Ave Maria Lane, and had called out “Torphut! Torphut!” as a signal of his contempt. Two of them heard this and ran in chase of Janekin, who turned upon his heels and fled down the lane. There was a fish-stall at the corner of a small yard and he sent it flying across their path. As they slipped upon herring and eel, he laughed out loud, with an exhilarating sensation of panic and excitement, before taking shelter in the porch of St. Agnes the Cripple. An old woman there offered him a candle. He took it, and walked reverently into the nave of the church. He blessed himself, lit the candle and left it by the shrine of St. Agnes with the prayer that he might escape his pursuers.

  St. Agnes must indeed have looked down upon London and touched Janekin with her blessing, since he made his way to St. John’s Street without any injury.

  He had been Radulf’s apprentice for the last three years. Before entering the merchant’s service he had sworn in the Hall of the Haberdashers and Drapers that he would not copulate or commit any fornication, and that he would not play at dice or hazard; on these matters, however, he had not proved entirely faithful to his oath. He had also agreed that “ye shall be obedient unto the wardens and unto all the clothing of this fellowship,” a stipulation which he had also disobeyed; he favoured the short hair and short tunics of the fashionable youth, and his slender legs were shown to best advantage in scarlet hose. Radulf was not a harsh master, and dismissed these failings as the way of the world. His wife, Anne Strago, had also pleaded on the apprentice’s behalf. “Can a young man,” she asked her husband, “be happy in such sad and wise stuff? Can he wear a slashed doublet in West Chepe? The dogs would bark at him.”