The Clerkenwell Tales, Peter Ackroyd [sight word readers txt] 📗

the cloister known as Pardon Church Haugh, the walls of which were covered by the Dance of Death.10 The franklin noticed the pope cavorting beside a skeleton. Ah, you, is it you that leads the dance of sorrow? He came out of the cloister and stopped before the Si quis? door, so named because of the notices pinned there by clerks looking for benefices. He took out the parchment of the Eighteen Conclusions, while in his other pocket he reached for the stone and the nails he had concealed there. With a few swift strokes he fixed the parchment to the door.11

“What do you do here?” The scrivener was standing behind him; he had followed him through the cathedral, and into the cloister.

“What do I do? I lead you to heaven’s gate.” He still had the stone in his hand and, with a savage movement, he struck the scrivener down.

Then he hastened back through the cloister and across the Dance of Death. He had just entered the north transept and was passing the fresco of the Miracles of the Virgin, when he heard his name. He looked first at the figures upon the wall, glowing in the decorated light, and then he licked the blood from his right fist. He was in fear until he saw Robert Rafu, the manciple, beside a pillar. “Quick, Barton. God is here. Come with me.” Rafu knew the shortest ways, and led Barton towards the newly built south transept where some furriers had already set up their shops. “Did you nail the Conclusions?”

“Someone was watching me.”

“Watching?”

“He seemed to threaten me. I had the stone in my hand, so I had no need of my dagger.”

“You killed him?”

“God killed him.”

“And you were not seen?”

“Only by the angels. Their wings covered me.”

They left the south transept, crossed the churchyard, and went out through the south gate into the warren of tumbledown houses and tenements which always seems to spring up in the shadow of great churches.

“Have you ever considered,” Garret Barton was saying, “how each fresco has its own light? Virtues shine more clearly in them. Like a tapestry.” He scarcely knew what he was saying. All was a dream. They had stopped at the corner of Paul’s Chain and Knightrider Street, beside the Cardinal’s Hat.

A group of apprentices pushed past them, shouting out “Bonjour!” and “Dieu vous save!” and “Bevis, à tout!” In the inn there was a harper, sitting cross-legged upon a table, waiting to play. The franklin and the manciple walked through the room, and then re-emerged into the street by another door. The Hat was too disordered for their quiet talk. So they made their way down Farthing Alley, where the Bethlem men begged.

“It was a scrivener,” Garret Barton said, “who asked me what I did.”

“You have favoured him. He has gone back.”

“Where no pens or receipts will trouble him.”

“You did a good deed, Garret. He is dissolved into time. Here is the place I sought.”

It looked like a house, but it was a tavern. Some men were playing checkers on a bench outside; Rafu and Barton stepped over the threshold into a room filled with laughter and raised voices. “Put the case,” someone was saying at Rafu’s right hand. “Put the case that the cloths were not good. The dye would not hold. Am I to be blamed for it?” Just behind Barton a man and woman were arguing. “It is all very well for you, dame patience. I grant you, patience is a great virtue. But not every man is perfect. I am not perfect.” A cat leapt down from a table on to the floor. A young man was staring down into a cup of ale, talking slowly and hesitantly to his companion. “The poor man is hard pressed on all sides. If he does not ask for his meat, he dies of hunger. If he asks for it, he dies of shame. I would rather die a better death. More, please. Fill it up.”

Rafu and Barton found a small table with two round stools and, when the tapster came over to clean away all the spilled beer and wine, they asked him what was best. “Ask your purse, sirs.” He was a surly man, used to dealing with customers who might be violent as well as drunken. “My best ale is fourpence a gallon. A gallon of Gascon wine is fourpence also. The Rhenish is eightpence. If you wish for sweet wine, then you must go to another place.” And how good was the Rhenish? “It will defy the dust.”

They sat in silence over their drinks and could distinctly hear the conversation between a pedlar and an old woman. “The parrot is luxurious and very fond of wine,” she was saying. “The drake is wanton and the cormorant is gluttonous.”

“What of the raven?”

“Oh, sir, the raven is wise. While the stork, you see, is jealous.”

“And a drunken old woman,” Barton murmured, “is as wallowing as a sow and as foolish as a she-ape.”

“They say of a drunken man,” Rafu whispered, “that he has seen the devil.”

“What of it? Lucifer himself cannot touch us.”

“So we can never be drunken? Never piss-pots or cup-shot?”

At another table one man was asking for the reckoning, even as the cry went up from his companions to let go and pass round the cup. One of them fell from his stool and, as he was pulled up by the tapster, began to urinate in his breeches. “When I said to put down your shot,” the tapster told him, “I meant your pennies and not your piss.”

There was general laughter, and Garret Barton leaned towards the manciple. “There is no heaven or hell for these, except earth itself.”

“Butler, fill the bowl!”

“God created them without souls.”

“Cast your counts first, friends. Sixpence each one.”

“They will return to earth and air, fire and water, without ever knowing that they have lived.”

“One pot more!”

A huckster selling laces peered into the tavern. The tapster shook his head at him, and