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

know your French. Vous estes sa morte. You must not only bridle the horse. You must curb him for ever.”

Emnot was on his guard. “For whom should I quake? For him or for me?”

“To kill is to be free. We are far above the law. We are the realm of love. When love is strong, love knows no law.” It was a settled doctrine of the foreknown men that they could kill with impunity as long as their instinct or humour suggested the occasion to them; they were then filled with the divine breath of all being and had become sacred. God killed His creation at every moment. But the predestined men could not kill for profit or with deliberate malice; the case of Miles Vavasour, then, was an ambiguous one. “I know, Emnot, that you are as true as stone. Do you know of any secret and close poison?”

“I have the means whereby I might –”

“I pray you put them in full expedition. God be with you.” Exmewe scratched his arm savagely. “I rely upon God. But I rely upon you more.”

“Is this your wish?”

“Turn up his halter and let him go.”

“I must bring death to him then?”

“God is here.” Exmewe looked up at the sky. “Come. The day passes fast.”

They walked off in the direction of the cathedral, wrapping their cloaks around them as the wind rose in the wide street.

The pardoner wandered down Wood Street, starting up his familiar lament. “O Jerusalem! Jerusalem! Where is pity? Where is meekness?” But, to Emnot Hallyng and William Exmewe, it was no more than wailing in the wind.

As soon as Exmewe returned to his chamber in St. Bartholomew he took out pen and parchment; in the fitful light of a tallow candle, he scratched out a letter which was addressed to Thomas Gunter at the sign of the Pestle at Bucklersbury by the church of St. Stephen in Walbrook. “Right trusty and well beloved friend, I greet you well.” He asked Gunter to meet the writer of this letter in the woods near Kentystone, at the break of day, “for diverse great matters reaching you, item: the churches of London in some peril of burning. There you shall hear from one who is a friend who will break his mind to you on an affair concerning your interest and your safety. I will write no more but I purpose to write again after our meeting with true evidences of what I will impart to you. Jesus keep you. Nota bene: I choose the woods of Kentystone since we can be assured that no one will be near us or with us. When you see me you will know me.”

He called for a carrier and gave him a penny for this letter’s delivery, on strict instruction that he should say it had been sent by a stranger.

Chapter Twenty

The Shipman’s Tale

The shipman, Gilbert Rosseler, lodged in a hostel for travellers; although he now lived in London, he enjoyed the constant change of companions with their own stories and adventures. He had once sailed as far north as Iceland; he had journeyed to Germany and to Portugal; he had sailed to Genoa, and from there to the island of Corfu; he had taken ship at various times to Cyprus, to the island of Rhodes, and to Jaffa. But, in his talk with his bedfellows, he ranged wider into unknown regions of the earth.

His hostel stood in St. Lawrence Lane, with the customary sign of a bush hanging over its door; it had a common dormitory, containing seven truckle beds on wheels in which travellers slept two by two. It was, for Gilbert Rosseler, as close to being in a ship’s cabin as was possible on land; he called his bed his “berth,” and his companions were his “mates.” They slept naked, according to custom. Nakedness was no cause of shame or embarrassment, and indeed it was said that a serpent fled from the sight of a naked man. Yet nakedness was also associated with punishment and poverty. It was as if all the travellers were willingly engaged in the experience of shared and bare humanity. A bed could be hired by the night, for a penny, or by the week for sixpence. The hosteler, Dame Magga, also had three private rooms – with their own bolt and key – which could be occupied for a shilling a week.

Magga was terrified of fire, like many householders of London. Since its most common cause was a candle igniting straw, she kept all candles in her possession; she would light them each night, and then extinguish them one hour after darkness had fallen. Some months before she had asked the shipman to perform that office in the dormitory, modesty forbidding her to walk among the naked men. In return she charged him only two shillings per week for his board at the high table in the hall of the hostel. Gilbert paid for his lodging and his food by taking Newcastle sea-coal up the Fleet by barge; he navigated his boat from Sea-Coal Lane, near the mouth of the Fleet, as far north as the woods of Kentystone or Kentish Town where a colony of metal-workers had set up a communal foundry.

On one afternoon, at the beginning of October, Gilbert had invited Magga on to his boat. She had expressed interest in “going up the river,” and had never been as far north as Kentystone. As a girl she had been taken to the church of St. Pancras for the festive day of Mary the Child, when she and the other children had danced around a tree decorated with images of the Virgin, but she hardly recalled that part of the countryside. This first day of the month was the eve of the Holy Guardian Angels. On the morning before, the members of the parliament house in Westminster Hall had accepted the resignation of Richard II as sovereign. The Archbishop of