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

you expected, and I shall tell you why. It is said that you have governed your people too harshly, and that they are discontented. If it is pleasing to the Lord, I shall help you to govern them better.” The king’s reply was also well known. “If it pleases you, fair cousin, then it pleases us well.” Certain reports added another detail. Richard had turned to the earl of Gloucester and had said, “Now I can see the end of my days coming.”

The king was not altogether popular in London. The stage on which his effigy had been paraded during the pageant of Midsummer Eve, for example, had been hooted at. Two years earlier he had demanded the wool and leather duties for life, and in recent months had imprisoned a sheriff for failures in his office. It was rumoured, too, that he intended to impose new taxes on the merchants in order to finance campaigns in Ireland and in Scotland. He was in Ireland when the present rebellion of Henry took shape in the north of England. The king had also become increasingly autocratic. A rumour spread among the citizens that he had erected a throne in Westminster Hall “where he sat from after meat to evensong speaking to no man but overlooking all men, and if he looked at any man, what estate or degree that ever he were of, he must kneel.”

Yet Coke Bateman had defended the king on many occasions. His nature was prone to awe and wonder in the contemplation of majesty. It was the same awe which filled him when he looked into the night sky and its revolving spheres. He knelt down in front of the Jesse window, and began to pray. “Beata viscera Mariae Virginis.” Blessed is the womb of the Virgin Mary. “Quae portaverunt aeterni Patris Filium.” But he was disturbed by errant thoughts. “Which bore the Son of the Eternal Father.” How could the Virgin’s womb have carried God Himself? How could divinity be contained? How could it hide in human flesh?

The miller’s daughter, Joan, had recently produced a child out of wedlock and he had asked Sister Clarice to advise Joan upon her course. The young nun had now become the most important source of authority within the convent, much to the dismay of Dame Agnes de Mordaunt, and Clarice was even visited by deputations of citizens asking for her counsel on civic matters. The prioress had sent a petition to the Bishop of London, Robert Braybroke, begging – or, rather, demanding – that Sister Clarice be sent to another religious house where there might be “plus petits dissensions”; but he was still considering the matter. He seemed strongly inclined towards the nun. In order to teach her humility, however, Dame Agnes had insisted that Clarice continue certain menial household tasks. She washed the floors of the frater and the dorter with a mop and wooden bucket; she scrubbed the bowls and ladles after meals, letting them dry in the sun. The miller had found her shelling peas at a trestle table in the kitchen of the convent; she was wearing a white woollen gown, thick and soft, with a white linen coif and veil. “God send you,” he said.

“Is that not how we address beggars, Coke Bateman, when we are not minded to give them alms?”

“Very well, Sister Clarice. I wish you great abundance of ghostly comfort and joy in God. Does that please you more?”

“It is sufficient. Sit down beside me and talk. I have not seen you in a long time.”

So for a while they conversed upon the little affairs of the mill and the convent. Then Clarice tapped his hand with the shell of a pea. “You have come to confer with me concerning your daughter’s case. Is that not so?” The miller was not surprised by her remark, since he suspected that the nuns had been discussing his daughter’s obvious condition.

“I have been considering upon it,” Clarice said without waiting for his answer, “and I have been thinking of this. When the Virgin was swollen with child, did anyone know or guess its father?”

“It must have been commonly known to be Joseph, sister.”

“Yet in the Clerkenwell play Joseph denies any such matter.” The miller was not clear what Clarice was supposing. “If Mary claimed that God had entered her, who would have believed her? So she was mocked. God loves abasement, you see. And we poor women are frail of kind.”

“What are you telling me?”

“Sit closer, and I shall whisper. I have seen the Questions of Mary. The Genna Marias has been revealed to me in golden letters as I slept. She was taken to the temple as a sacred priestess, a maryam, and there she did copulate with the high priest Abiathar. Do you know the Latin meretrix?” It was, as the miller discovered later, the term for a harlot or courtesan. But he had already heard and understood enough to be profoundly shaken by Sister Clarice’s words; to him it seemed to be a great storm of uncleanness.

“Bring Joan to me,” she said. “She will become my loved sister in Christ. I will drop sweetness in her soul.”

He muttered something about his daughter’s coming confinement, and then left the nun still shelling peas in the kitchen. He guessed that she had spoken plain heresy, but he decided to say nothing. The nun was travelling down strange paths and, from that time forward, he vowed to avoid her company. He did not wish to be in any way tainted by her blasphemies.

As he knelt before the Jesse window in St. Sepulchre, he heard a movement in an aisle behind him. A young man was crouched in front of a side altar dedicated to the saints Cosmos and Damian, and seemed slowly to be moving towards it; he was holding something beneath his cloak. Coke Bateman thought that he was creeping to the cross but then, suddenly, the young man rose to his feet