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

and then ran up some outside steps to a first-floor chamber. Exmewe had often told Hamo that London was no more than a veil, a pageant cloth, which must be torn asunder to see the face of Christ shining. But at times like this the city seemed real enough. The child was calling out to someone. Hamo turned the corner of Paternoster Row, into the street of the illuminators and parchment-makers whose work was displayed all around him. He glimpsed a saint holding up his arms in ecstasy while, at the bottom of the page, an ape clambered among vines. Here was an image of the Virgin, but in the margins there were geese and dogs and foxes. There was a song sheet entitled Mysteria tremenda.

Exmewe had walked along St. Anne Lane and turned right into Forster Lane; after the events of the morning, he had a sudden desire for meat. His anger had quickened his appetite. He was angry because in part he despised himself. What was the phrase? You cannot have two heads under one hood. He began to crave thrushes, pies, sows’ feet, anything. Yet he must take care. Always take care. He was aware that he had a tendency to melancholy, and so he refrained from fried meat and from meat which was over-salted. Of course boiled meat was better for melancholy men than roast meat, but in particular he avoided the taste of venison; the deer is a beast that lives in fear, and fear only increases the melancholy humour. If he had eaten venison, he would have fled all the sooner from Aldersgate. There was a cookshop close by, where journeymen and labourers ate their boiled mutton bones and penny ale. There would be much talk and much wind; the air would be mightily corrupted.

There were occasions when he enjoyed such close-smelling company, however, just as he enjoyed listening to the sins of the poor. It was the smell of humankind, and those who lived in the city had become accustomed to it. There were even those who welcomed human odour and would seek it out in unwholesome places – they were known as “snufflers,” and would haunt privies or open jakes for their pleasure. They would follow those citizens who possessed a particular or pungent smell, until they were filled with the evil scent. Exmewe approached the door of the cookshop but the noise and confusion within, like the clattering of a mill, drove him back. Someone was singing “My love has fared inland.” He could not eat with this company. Instead he stopped at a roasting-stall and bought two finches for a penny, tossing their small and fragile bones into the middle of the street as he walked westward towards Newgate.

Richard Marrow left the tooth-drawer to the mercy of the people, and managed to make his way down St. Martin into Old Change. There was much building work here, in the precincts of Paul’s, and the street was filled with cries of “Yous!” and “Yis!” and “Hoo!” The builders’ carts were pulled by horses or by mastiff-hounds, and the labourers played football or sang over their cups in their brief if frequent intervals of rest. It was the way of London.

When Marrow turned from their shouts and cries into Maidenhead Lane, he was in his own familiar neighbourhood. He was known here as “Long Richard,” or “Long Dicoun.” No one knew of his association with William Exmewe, but he was generally considered to be “touched” or “blessed” by some unworldly spirit. He showed no respect towards the rich or the high-born, for example, and never murmured “God save you” when he met them; he never bowed before them or hid his hands in his sleeve or took off his cap before speaking. He was often chided for his behaviour by his neighbours, who were concerned for the reputation of their ward, but on more than one occasion he had replied that “I would rather eat worms in the wood than bow to their folly.” When asked about his tattered clothes he told the story of the peacock who in the deep of night, when he could not see himself, cried because he thought he had lost his beauty. When asked if he knew how his conduct threatened the order of the city, he asked “if the pissing of a wren can disturb the sea?” “Besides,” he would remark, “I am too long to stoop low.” By the more pious inhabitants of the ward he was compared to a cross that stands in the street, showing men the way.

By the evening, Hamo Fulberd had returned to St. Bartholomew. He lived in a small stone barn erected in a corner of the churchyard, by the outside wall; he slept here, upon a plank covered with straw, with the tools of his trade arranged neatly on a low table beneath the window. He drew comfort from the silent presence of these familiar objects – the hair brushes, the pencils, the earthenware bowls and the glass phials. There were no woollen blankets here, no tapestries or cushions; all was as plain as the barn itself, except that the floor was of earth and turf like the rest of the churchyard in which it stood. He sat down upon his stool, and began to work upon a parchment which he had been given by his teacher, Father Matthew, as a reward for his assiduousness. He was drawing an image of the Three Living and Three Dead. The living ones held scrolls, on which their oaths were written. “By God’s bones that was good ale” and “By the feet of Christ I will beat you at the dice” were complemented with “By God’s heart I will go to town.” Hamo was erasing part of a badly drawn figure, rubbing it with the skin of a stockfish, when Exmewe quietly entered the barn. “This is a brittle world, Hamo.” He stood behind the boy’s shoulder, peering down at his