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

And then he was noticed. One of the women screamed out, “There goes Bogo the summoner!” He was not in his own parish, but he was known by sight to many Londoners. “There’s Bogo!” He was grabbed by both hands and dragged into the dance; he was held tightly underneath each arm, and found himself being whirled around the fire at what seemed to him to be an ever increasing speed. And then the women came closer to the flames; they swayed by the edge of the fire and Bogo was aware that the leather of his shoes, and the cloth of his hose, were being singed. He cried out in alarm and the women fell back, laughing, as he scrambled to his feet. Two of them pursued him, kicked him to the ground, and beat him with their fists. Then one of them, instinctively imitating the common practice of street fights, bit off the lobe of his ear. He howled and the women, sensing his pain, yelled in triumph. It was the savage yell, hard, prolonged, exultant, which often sounded through London. It was the cry of the city itself. They left him lying in Old Change, the blood running from his wound into the earth and stone.

Chapter Fourteen

The Miller’s Tale

Coke Bateman, the miller for the convent of Clerkenwell, was kneeling in the north transept of St. Sepulchre. He had just delivered twelve sacks of flour to the parish priest of that church; the priest had agreed to act as arbiter in the miller’s dispute with the bailiff over that stretch of the Fleet that ran between them. The bailiff had in turn presented him with a mastiff, since the priest had complained of roarers and masked men who seemed strangely drawn to the Newgate prison.

The mill beside the Fleet was less than a mile beyond the city gates, and Coke Bateman often drove his cart within the walls. For him it was a city of springs and streams. He had grown so accustomed to the sound of water rushing beneath his mill that it seemed to him to be the sound of the world. He slept with the rush of waters, and awoke with their rhythms in his head. He knew the harsh and hasty sound of the Fleet, therefore, and compared it carefully and deliberately with the other rivers within the city. He recognised the soft sound of the Falcon soughing through reeds, the disturbed and excitable Westbourne with its hidden springs sending out competing currents, the slow and heavy Tyburn winding through marshes, the light Walbrook gliding over stones and pebbles, and the Fleet itself with its strong and sweeping central current running like a sigh through the city. And then of course there was the Thames, majestic, many-voiced, at one moment a mass of dark turbulence and at the next a gleaming sheet of light.

Was that the river in this Jesse window above the north transept, stained in the colour of verdigris, upon whose bank St. Erconwald was standing with arms uplifted? The priest had urged Coke Bateman to see this newly installed treasure, the work of Janquin Glazier who lived in Cripplegate. “Do you recall,” he had asked the miller, “the blazing star of three years ago which kept its course rising west in the north?”

“A great glowing thing. Yes. I recall it very well. It appeared less and less until it was as little as a hazel stick.”

“That star is in the window!”

There it was, glowing in the glass where Richard II knelt before the figure of John the Baptist. Among them curled the branches of the Jesse tree itself; in the central stem, issuing from the body of the sleeping Jesse, were placed in ascending order David and Solomon, the Virgin and the crucified Christ, with Christ in glory above them. At the Mass for the window’s consecration two young brothers, joined by the hip-bone, sang “Mater salutaris” very sweetly.

Coke Bateman was particularly interested in the figure of the king; he was draped in a robe of red and white, with a large golden crown upon his head. The miller had seen the king once at close hand, when Richard had dined at Clerkenwell with the abbot of the Monks Hospitallers at St. John’s. The king had ridden there beneath a great canopy of gold in order to celebrate the rebuilding of the great hall of the priory, after it had been fired by Wat Tyler and his ragged army. The miller had noticed then how the king had behaved as if he were in the pages of a psalter. He had been wearing the gown known as the houpelande which went down to the knee; it was of scarlet and was studded with fleurs-de-lis in pearls. The king’s ermine cap was embroidered with golden letters, and he wore pointed shoes of white leather tied to silk knee-stockings with chains of silver. Even when he was greeted, and given the kiss of fellowship, he remained impassive. His own silence seemed to enjoin silence upon others, so that the proceedings continued within an expectant hush. It was as if time itself had been suspended. To Coke Bateman, Richard seemed neither old nor young, but somehow the age of the world. In this stained window he seemed to be no different; in five hundred years, in a time beyond the imagining of any then in life, he would still be kneeling there in quietness and piety.

It was difficult for Coke Bateman to contemplate the king’s present troubles. How could this image of sacred order be subject to distress and change? The miller, like everyone else, was acquainted with the news of Richard’s plight. Only five days earlier Richard had surrendered himself into the custody of Henry Bolingbroke. Henry’s words to him had already been repeated in the streets and taverns of the city. “My lord, I have come sooner than