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

“This is a cold night.”

“There is a city of janglers, and a city of God. That man belonged to the janglers.”

“The tooth man?”

“His dwelling is now in hell.”

“Are you telling me that he is dead?”

Exmewe put his hands upon Hamo’s shoulders. “There is no shorter way.” Hamo would never have guessed, or suspected, that Exmewe was lying to him. The tooth-drawer lived, and was even then repeating the story of his attack in a tavern called the Running Pie-Man. “His body has been recovered and now lies in the Barber Surgeons’ Hall for the greater glory of his profession. We must keep you close and secret until he is buried.”

Hamo rocked upon his stool. “Why? Why do I not belong to the play of the good people?”

“What good people? The world is thick with thieves.” Exmewe felt the strangest sensation of pity. “Do not lose heart. Your best friend is still alive.”

“Who?”

“You.”

Hamo cried, and then laughed aloud, at this. “So I am as alone as I was born.”

“You are not alone. You are part of the kingdom of the blessed.”

Hamo had listened when Exmewe had expounded to Marrow the secret religion. He had listened incredulously when the friar had told the carpenter that Christ had not voluntarily gone to the sacrifice of the Cross, but had been a victim of a “coivin” or conspiracy between the two other members of the Trinity. He had heard, too, their debates about the nature of destiny and providence. “So what comes, comes by destiny,” Marrow had said.

Hamo remembered this now, as he sat upon his stool with the stockfish in his hand, and questioned Exmewe. “So all is foretold by providence?” It was a comparatively new debate, instigated by the theologians of Oxford. In recent years many people had been driven to despair by the idea that they were foredoomed, and that nothing in the world could avert the fate that was awaiting them. There were some who flagellated themselves as a preparation for the punishment to come. It had become so serious a problem among the clergy, for example, that a papal encyclical had been issued against the sin of wanhope. The notion of providence, and of the timelessness of God, induced feelings of helplessness and lassitude. And yet for others the same doctrine was a cause of celebration; they did not feel responsible for their actions, and as a result could sin without remorse. The choice of heaven and hell was beyond them, entirely out of their control, and therefore they could act – or refrain from acting – with impunity.

“Did I destroy the tooth-drawer by providence or by destiny?”

“All will be well.”

“Will it?”

“Do not walk or ride outside Bartholomew without my express commandment.”

Exmewe left him then, and Hamo Fulberd continued work upon the parchment. Then quite suddenly he put his head upon it and began to weep, calling upon the unspeakable mercy of God.

Chapter Three

The Merchant’s Tale

The hour before dawn had come quietly into St. John’s Street. A pig wandered down Pissing Alley, having escaped the attentions of the night warden, and from one of the many small tenements along the street came the sound of a baby crying. The haberdasher, Radulf Strago, was about to leave the bed while his wife was still sleeping. He had suffered a bad dream, in which he had said to his mother, “I will give you two yards of linen cloth in which to wrap your body when you are hanged.” Even at the time he knew that she had died peacefully, some three years before, from a surfeit of strawberries. In his dream there had begun to fall great flakes of snow, as if they had been locks of wool. He had been trying to knock them away with the flip-flap used to swat flies, but the wool then turned into pieces of frieze cloth and broad cloth. He had awoken in a sweat but, as a practical man whose thoughts were already forming around the business of the day, he dismissed these visions as fantasies. The cramp or flux in his stomach was still there; he had trusted himself to shit it out, but it remained like a hard knot within his body.

He blessed himself and rose from his bed; with a groan he crept over to a small wooden table where he combed his hair before washing his face and hands in a basin of water. He was still naked but he slipped on a linen shift before kneeling on the floor for his pater noster and credo. Then he sat down upon the side of the bed and, muttering a litany to the Mother of God, he drew on a pair of short woollen socks and some woollen hose striped in blue and mustard yellow. There was no need for a doublet on this spring morning, and so he put on a simple jacket of blue serge cloth; he whispered the invocation “Memento, Domine,” so as not to disturb his wife, as he donned his green tunic and scarlet hood. I have prayed faithfully, he said under his breath, so the Lord send me good profit. He slipped on his pointed red shoes, fashioned out of the finest leather, and laced them carefully before walking down the wooden stairs to the solar below. His apprentice was sleeping on a pallet, and he roused him with a “Torolly-lolly, Janekin. It is the spring time of the world.”

Radulf Strago, at the age of fifty-seven, might have been considered to be in his declining time; but he had married a much younger woman two years before, and had reason to consider himself blessed. It is true that he had been sore and sick in recent weeks; he had cause to vomit every day, and his stools were as loose as running water. He sometimes feared that he had a cancer or imposthume, but he tried to dismiss these symptoms as part of his sanguinary