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

am not a carry tale, Alice. I will not nick anyone’s name. Sir Miles is under my charge, and I have a great care for him –”

“Is it so? Well, have no care at all. This smith is good. Can you hear him beating with his hammer?” She laughed. “He has a young tutty. A tuzziemuzzie.”

“A maid girl, then?”

“Rose le Pilcherer. Of this parish.”

“I warrant she is too young to be found in the catch-poll book.”

“Not too young to be fisked and ramped. Eleven years. I found her in the clipping house. Sweeping hair.”

“And you stalked her like a crane.”

“I spoke with her, and she followed me. She wants coin.”

“It is no wisdom to want a thing that is not honest.”

“How! Trolli-lolli, Master Gunter. A fool will always be teaching and never be taught. There are girls who will go behind a hedge for twopence or a sheaf of wheat. Rose will have shillings in her purse. Am I to be blamed for doing good works? Truss up your gear, and ride away.”

The Wife of Bath was as hard as London, some said, and as merry. You could no more rail against her than against the city itself. So Gunter bade farewell to her with the kiss of peace. It was not returned.

Chapter Sixteen

The Cook’s Tale

The coquina on Nuncheon Street was the largest in London; its principal chamber could hold one hundred people, and there were several rooms or “messes” where a smaller number could eat together. It was familiarly known as “Roger’s” after Roger of Ware, the cook who owned it and who still supervised the preparation of the food. He was a slim man with a small and neatly cut beard, who wore the white pie-shaped hat which was the symbol of his trade. “Everything must be scrubbed fair!” He was walking around the great kitchen beside the principal chamber. “Fair! Fair! Fair! Do you hear me, Walter?” He approached a young servant. “Let me see your hands. Have you been touching turds? Go wash! John, this skimmer needs rinsing. Do you see the scum upon it? It is not good. Not good!”

There were two fireplaces facing each other on opposite sides of the kitchen, a fish fire and a meat fire, and the combined heat of their flames was so intense that most of the workers had taken off their shirts and were working in their under-linen. So the smell of human sweat mixed with the other odours. Roger walked among them in a richly embroidered jacket, with his hose attached to it by latchets known as gadlings or harlots; he wore long and pointed shoes fashionably curved at the tip and known as cracows. His pie-shaped hat, however, turned him into what he called a “mixed medley.”

“There is white grease in the base of this skillet! Do I need to scrub everything with my own hands?” He inspected the pots and flesh-hooks, the ladles and the pestles, the plates and pans, hanging against the plastered walls. “Simkin, have you sent to the spicer’s shop?” He loved to shout over the general noise. “There is no more saffron here than in a nun’s arse!” Simkin was one of the three cooks who tended to the meats, an ill-favoured man who was said by his colleagues to have a trick of curdling milk by belching into it. He was pounding larks and pigeons in a platter bowl and paid no attention to Roger. “God forbid, Simkin, that you should hear me.” Roger wiped his fingers across the rim of a wooden bowl containing pig grease. “They say that evil manners follow the likeness of an ugly man. Is that so, Simkin?”

Simkin studied him for a moment. “I have too much business here, Master Roger, to run after saffron like some pannier woman.”

“Oh, tra-la. She answers back.” Roger was known privately by those who worked for him as Dame Durden or Old Mother Trot; he had the same sharpness of tongue, and the same ribald humour, as those old ladies from the interludes. With his pinched features and exaggeratedly mincing gait, he also resembled them.

On one long table were laid out pheasant, goose, wild fowl, brawn, pork, bacon and tripe; some meats were already turning on the spit, together with the head of a boar and a side of venison. A large cauldron stood over one part of the fire, its three legs planted firmly in the burning embers. An elderly man was drawing out pieces of meat with a flesh-hook, as he had done for thirty years; he had worked in this kitchen long before Roger had come here. There had been a cookshop on this site for more than a hundred years, testifying if nothing else to the fixed habits of the London population.

Thick waves of smell, meat upon meat, were mingled with the sharper savours of pike and of tench; the musty odour of eel was mixed with the tang of pig’s flesh, the quickness of herring with the slowness of oxen. It was point and counterpoint taken out of a songbook of smell. The kitchen was a little city of smells. There was not one person who passed the cookshop who did not perceive the differences between them, who did not distinguish between the savour of beam and of perch, of leeks and of beans, of green figs and of cabbage. The savour of cooked food, fish or flesh, permeated the stones of the neighbourhood; the area was haunted by dogs of every description, which were sometimes killed by the arrows or slingshots of the apprentices and flung into the ditch at the end of the street. The name of the street itself, “nuncheon,” signified a meal or repast taken in the afternoon.

“This is the man who started to build and could not finish!” Roger was watching one of his cooks, who was trying unsuccessfully to blend chopped pigs’ livers, milk, hard-boiled eggs and ginger. “God may send a man