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

good meat, but the devil may send an evil cook to destroy it. Is that not so, Myttok?”

The young cook did not look up from his board, but he cut a little more deeply into the ginger. “These livers, Master Roger, are so hard that I might play ball with them. When did you go to market?”

“I see that it must be my own fault. Bless me, Mary, for I have sinned.” The heat and the noise of the kitchen always infected their words; anyone coming upon them, from the street, would believe them to be engaged in continual ferocious argument.

“Well, master, fair words will only fatten your head.”

“You should know, whoreson. Your arse is as big as two barrels.”

Walter, the knave of the kitchen, ran through the passage and put his hand to his mouth in order to make the sound of a bugle. “They are come! They are come!” The first customers had arrived for their noon meat, and had pulled off their caps. Walter had already set the tables. The places had been prepared with trencher, napkin and wooden spoon; every man had his own loaf of bread and cup laid out before him, together with a bowl of salt for each pair. On each table was a small iron lantern with horn windows, to be lit on dark days, although the coquina itself was bright enough. Its walls had been plastered and decorated with scenes of hunting and hawking; there were words coming out of the mouths of the huntsmen, such as “sa cy avaunt!,” “so ho!” and “ware! ware!” The red clay floor was strewn with fresh rushes.

As Roger walked into the chamber to welcome the first arrivals, he was surrounded by the familiar and friendly language of greeting. “What do you?” “How is it with you?” “How do you fare?” “God give you good day.” These phrases were a form of perpetual renewal, so that each day was joined to others in the line of harmony. Roger took their cloaks and gowns from them, nodding to strangers and addressing familiar acquaintances as “sir gully-gut” or “sir lick-dish” or “sir glutton.” As the bells of St. Denis rang twelve the room was filled with calls for boiled beef in cloves and fried almonds, mussels in pike broth, pigs’ ears boiled in wine, partridges roasted with ginger, fried eels in sugar and mackerel in mint sauce. In the kitchen the cooks were making plates of fruit and vegetables, all boiled or stewed; it was considered unhealthy to eat anything which had not been cooked. The customers ate with their own knives off plates of pewter; they drank out of cups made of leather or wood or tin. There was also a voider on each table, for all the slops and crumbs which would be distributed by Roger to the beggars outside the door.

The conversation was loud and coarse and animated. Who had heard news of the king? There were many rumours and false reports exchanged between the tables, as well as laments about the condition of the time. It was known for certain only that Henry Bolingbroke, with Richard II as his prisoner, had recently arrived in Dunstable. He had proclaimed to the crowd from the clock tower there that he would arrive in London on the first day of the new month. The first of September was the Feast of the Twelve Martyrs, and the customers in Roger’s coquina spoke of a thirteenth. Henry had a violent ambition for the throne. “The change of season may make us all sad and sick,” Hanekyn Fytheler said to Hugyn Richokson.

“I pray God send us a merry world,” Hugyn replied.

“I do not say to the contrary. How does your sister do?”

“Well. Never better.”

At the next table Roger of Ware himself was examining a jewelled box handed to him by Henry Huttescrane. “What is it worth?”

“You shall have it cheap, Roger.”

“I smell a beard.”

“No, I swear not. It is out of Afric.”

The physician, Thomas Gunter, was eating with Emnot Hallyng, the clerk; they were both members of the Ancient Order of Men Who Like to Stroke Cats. The title may have had some literal connotation but “to stroke a cat” meant also to approach a problem or conundrum in a quiet and amicable spirit. The question they had been discussing the previous evening had been, “If Adam had never known Eve, would all humankind be male?” During the course of these proceedings Gunter had asked Hallyng to eat with him on the following day. He did not know that the clerk was one of the predestined men, but he enjoyed both his company and his conversation on abstruse matters. In fact he had been telling Gunter about his cousin’s encounter with certain supposed spirits in Camomile Street; to which the physician had replied, it were possible that shapes, whether corporeal or incorporeal, might be conjured forth from powers which were neither earth nor water, fire nor air, nor any creature made from them. He recalled the words of the monk, Gervase of Winchester, before his sudden death, which were, “Who is there knocking?” There were many deep in mawmettrie who cast plots and said the night-spells. “Well enough, master clerk. There are so many subtle passings and dissimulations that I say no more. How is your cheese?”

“Too dry,” Emnot replied. “I like Essex cheese, not this Sussex cheese.”

“Have no more then. Dry cheese stops the liver and engenders the stone. If it lies long enough it makes a stinking breath and a scurvy skin.”

“But I am hungry.”

“Take some butter instead. You know the sentence. Butter is gold in the morning, silver at noon and lead at night. Try some silver.”

“You never leave off your trade, Thomas Gunter. You are bound to the stake.”

“It is for your good. Butter is best for children while they are growing and old men when they are declining. You are in the middle way. Eat butter first and eat it last, and live till