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

“I am glad to hear it, ma dame.”

She laughed, and a necklace suddenly appeared from beneath her chin. “I see your meat-wand is stirring in your hose, Sir Trindle-Tail.”

“Love is in season, Alice.”

“Love is hot in summer, then. Fall to work with a will.”

“If you will show me the way.”

Dame Alice never jangled about love, as she put it. Hers was a more practical humour. “I may not stop the evil that blows about the world,” she had told one of the priests who frequented her tavern. “But I may help men to forget it.”

“We are all frail,” the priest had replied. “We come of sinful stock.”

“By Christ’s cross it is the truth.”

She knew of what she spoke. Her mother had followed the same trade, from an undercroft in an alley off Turnmill Street. As a very young girl she had seen all the corners of lust. At the age of twelve she had conceived a child by Coke Bateman, the old miller’s son, whose dwelling was a few hundred yards to the north, but her mother had persuaded her to drown the newborn baby in the Fleet. Many infants had already floated down that river into the Thames, where they were “taken up” by watermen as a danger to nets. She had met Coke Bateman in a pudding shop, the following week, but he had not spoken of his child; they had sat side by side, but they had said nothing to one another. And she had thought then – what is all this feigning of love? It is a mere mock of the mouth.

After her mother’s death Alice had opened up a balneolum or small bath-house in St. John’s Street; that is how she had acquired her name. When she had purchased the lease rent on a tenement in Turnmill Street, however, she was surprised to learn that her landlord was the convent of St. Mary. But then she began to profit from her fame. “The Wife of Bath” became synonymous with bawdiness. A sermon was preached against her by the priest of St. Mary Abchurch, during which he had declared that “a fair woman that is foul of her body is like to a ring of gold in the snout of a sow.” She had heard the phrase a few days later, and ever afterwards she called him “the priest of Apechurch.” She compared him to the loathsome toad which cannot endure the sweet smell of the vine. He returned the insult, one evening in the pulpit, when he spoke against certain bawds or lenos who are like the painted beetle which, flying in the hot sun of May, has no liking for fair flowers but loves to alight on the filth of any beast wherein alone is its delight. It became known as “The Wife of Bath sermon,” and her fame in London was assured.

Dame Alice took Miles Vavasour into a small room warmed by a brazier. “We have no crowders tonight, Sir Piss-Pot.”

She had hired no musicians since, as she had said, lewdness needs no tunes. In truth the last night of music had ended in disorder, when one of the musicians had insulted an elderly courtier. The old man had put his hand in his hose in order to scratch himself, and the musician had noticed the movement. “They should have taught you at Westminster,” he said to general laughter, “never to touch meat with your right hand.” The courtier had drawn his baselard and a scuffle ensued which, as always in London, ended as suddenly and as abruptly as it had begun. Dame Alice had ordered the musicians to leave her tavern – or, as she put it, “hitch your stained buttocks!” – and swore never to hire them again. So there was no music on the night of Miles Vavasour’s visit.

“She is a maid,” she said again, “but I swear that she will jet up and down for you. You will sweat well tonight.”

“Does she frisk about?”

“She is a giglet. A fisgig.”

“Then I will have her.”

“But you must pay. Empty fists retain no hawks.” Miles Vavasour had a reputation for meanness. He was known as a scrapegood or, as Dame Alice said, “a dry fellow who will not lose the droppings of his nose.”

“Well, ma dame, what is the reckoning?”

“Two shillings.”

“What?”

“You look more sour than wormwood. I said two shillings.”

“My doublet cost me the same!”

“It will not warm you so well, Sir Pox.”

“I can have a roast pig for eightpence, dame.”

“You may pay a penny a night for a bed with blankets and sheets, in any hostelry. Is that why you are here?”

“But two shillings!”

“If you do not like her, I have a remedy for lust. It can be put away by smelling the savour of your own shoes when they are taken off. Is that what you wish?”

The deal was done, and the child was brought into Miles’s chamber; she was wearing a blue robe trimmed with fur, and nothing else. “Well, girl,” he said, “it is not with your estate to wear such fine furs.”

“Dame Alice has been good to me, sir.”

The Wife of Bath had been listening at the door but now, with a candle in her hand, she made her way quietly down the staircase. Then she saw Thomas Gunter leaning against a small prie-dieu by the door; he was examining its wooden carvings of grotesques. She knew him very well. “Is it you, leech? We have no need of you tonight, you carcass bird.”

“At least, ma dame, I am no screech owl.” They both enjoyed the play of insults, in which neither ever triumphed.

“How do you, nurrit?” She had a wealth of words to express his littleness – knurl, nirb, murch, nurg – and never refrained from using them.

“Well, thank God.” He lifted his eyes to the top of the staircase. “And how does Miles?”

“Hold your tongue and say the best.” It was an ancient proverb. “And let your neighbour lie in rest.”

“I