To Calais, In Ordinary Time Read online

  ‘“I’ll choke him and be free. I’ll pitch a hole in his throat with my bare right arm.”’

  ‘You’re a bold fighter to gab you might choke the Fiend. How many have you slain?’

  ‘“I ne number them, shit-sucker, but each was rightly spilled.”’

  ‘Do you ne fear Christ, Dickle?’

  ‘“I ne fear no one.”’

  ‘Do you love him?’

  ‘“I ne worth him so high as others do. I had them nail me to a post in Germany to see how hard a man he was, and I ne died.”’

  ‘You might pay a man to take you down, and Christ ne could. Why do you have the cross corven in ink on your forehead, Dickle, if you ne worth Christ?’

  Thomas was still. There wasn’t no sound in the room, like to all the land about listened.

  ‘Spoke you, Dickle? I can’t hear you. You’d have the world think you ne feared God or the Fiend but the cross on your forehead says otherwise.’

  ‘“It is the rood of England and St George, frog-fucker.”’

  ‘I ween you fear. Ne rue you the murder of Cess’s father?’

  ‘“That wasn’t murder but a Frenchman rightly spilled in wartide.”’

  Softly told Dickle he spoke well and true.

  ‘The French maid, Cecile,’ said Thomas, ‘was she rightly reft of her maidenhood while her father lay killed nearby? To be stolen from her kin, was that right?’

  ‘“I can’t speak for he as reft it from her and stole her. I ne did those things.”’

  ‘And you ne knew her against her will at that time?’

  ‘“No.”’

  ‘I shan’t let you fare to hell so lightly. Tell me the truth, did you know Cess in her father’s yard in Mantes against her will?’

  ‘“God’s nails, I ne knew her. I went to another stead in the yard to be further from her cries.”’

  ‘Why? Wasn’t it your even-archers will that you had a share of their glee with the maid?’

  ‘“I was sorry. It wasn’t right to do her as she was done.”’

  Softly reached for Dickle as if he would strike him, but the others held him back. Softly said it wasn’t true, Dickle flew from Cess in fear of her cunt, and he’d pissed himself in fright, for it had always been his greatest fear.

  Thomas held up his hands. ‘This isn’t no court of law,’ he said. ‘We must take Dickle at his word. He forgave all, and asked forgiveness of all, and if he were truly sorry in his heart for what was done to Cess, God will know, and do he bide a thousand years in purgatory, he has hope to be with Christ after.’

  Far away they heard the priest’s bell, getting louder. Some went out in the yard to see, along with many of the guests, for the word had already gone round that the Fiend, in the shape of a goat, had dealt the worst of the bowmen a deadly blow. Into the yard came Holiday, followed by a chaplain in his mass-hackle carrying Christ in the box, with two knaves behind to carry the light and ring the bell, and a third with a handcart. All fell to their knees and bowed their heads. But when the chaplain brought the box to Dickle, Dickle couldn’t eat of the Lord’s body, for he ne breathed no more.

  THOMAS DREW THE chaplain upstairs to his room. After an hour they came down. They should have sent for a priest sooner, the chaplain said, but Thomas had wrought right, and it seemed that, at the end, Dickle had found true sorrow for his sins, and might hope to come to heaven of purgatory, and his body might be buried in holy ground. ‘It’s the Fiend’s oldest craft,’ the chaplain said, ‘to make believers fear their sins too great to be forgiven.’

  The chaplain oiled Dickle’s body and dight ash on the rood on his forehead, and he was wrapped in a shroud and done in the handcart, for he mightn’t lie in the inn. The bowmen gave the deacon sixpence, and a penny each for his knaves, and he blessed them, and bade them light candles for their friend in church before the burial. And he left, and one knave bode to wheel Dickle to the lying-in.

  Here the bowmen began to wrangle. Softly said he wouldn’t have Longfreke at the burial, for he ne worthed Dickle, and Longfreke said he worthed him higher than Softly, and he would come to the burial, for they were of one fellowship. He took the handles of the cart, and Softly and Holiday would have fought him, had Hayne ne come between them.

  Hayne said he would go with Softly, Holiday and Hornstrake to be with Dickle at the lying-in and the burial, and to wash him, for if the clerks saw the likeness of hell-mouth on his bare chest, their mood would shift. Longfreke would bide at the inn with Will, Sweetmouth, Mad and Thomas, and in the morning they would go to Westbury, find Laurence Haket, light candles for Dickle, and bide on Hayne and the others, that they go on to Dorset together.

  They asked Will if he knew where the lady Bernadine was, for she’d taken her horse and goods and left her keys. Will said he only knew she’d found herself a maid of their town, so she wasn’t alone no more, wherever she’d gone.

  BERNA RODE INTO Westbury in the saffron light before cock-crow. Madlen walked beside her, agitating her mistress’s ankle to prevent her succumbing to fatigue and tumbling of the saddle. All the beasts and people were asleep. The sound of Jemsy’s hooves on the durable terrain of the high street echoed of the closed-up shops.

  Madlen beat on the door of the inn till a porter showed his face at an ouverture and effused blasphemies.

  ‘I am Lady Bernadine Corbet, and you will instantly provide me with a private chamber,’ said Berna.

  The inn was full, the porter said, and the kitchen closed. In a discourteous manner he demanded to know if the demoiselle or her maid suffered from contagious maladies or fevers, and if they’d travelled from Dorset.

  They assured him they were robust, if enfeebled by their journey, that they came from the north, and that they had seen no signs of disease on their route.

  The porter looked them up and down, unbarred the door and said he supposed the demoiselle was on her way to the joust.

  Berna hesitated. Madlen said the porter was correct.

  Better that they carry on, he said. Edington was only two hours away, and those who were sans tent might rent one at sixpence a day, with beds and all that was necessary for a noble demoiselle’s ménage agreeable.

  ‘Porter,’ said Berna in a trembling voice, ‘tell me this. Is there in your inn a young esquire by the name of Laurence Haket? For I would—’

  Madlen interrupted. She told the porter curtly that the demoiselle required a brief halt to refresh herself and her horse before continuing to Edington. He should place a table and chairs for them in the court, furnish them with wine and victuals and rouse a stable-boy.

  Berna attempted to raise her voice again, but Madlen was pressing her ankle so severely that she simply cried out. The porter left them and Berna dismounted. She closed her eyes, leaned back against Jemsy and complained that as insufferable as the journey had been to her joints, it wasn’t so terrible as the prospect of appearing to Laurence in such disarray.

  Madlen urged her to courage. Remembered she not what they’d agreed when they sat together in the saddle?

  ‘Was it your voice incessantly in my ear?’ said Berna. ‘And did I reply? I thought it a reverie.’

  Having come so far, said Madlen, would the lady permit herself to fail now?

  Berna opened her eyes, turned to face Madlen and crossed her arms. ‘At this moment,’ she said, ‘I would sacrifice all my prospects to see you suspended in mid-air with a rope around your throat.’

  At that moment, Madlen replied, the only person she could complain to about Madlen was Madlen, so she’d be well-advised to preserve her life. What was essential was that when Laurence appeared, the demoiselle confidently demonstrate her disregard for his requirements, and her certainty in her own intention, which was to journey on to the joust and to sojourn there at her pleasure. No matter how reasonable his objections, she must counter them, and insist on her power to choose her course.

  Berna laughed. ‘Why should I attend to you? Were I to examine your notions of romance I’m s
ure I’d discover them composed of different cuts of pork, like a butcher’s counter.’

  The porter came with a table, a red-eyed maid brought a pitcher of watered wine, and a boy led Jemsy away. The porter said the inn observed the proprieties, and he mightn’t allow the demoiselle to visit the squire in his chamber, unaccompanied or otherwise; but he’d informed the young man of her presence.

  ‘Mother in heaven, he comes,’ said Berna, and bit the ends of her fingers.

  WHEN WILL ROSE in Melksham that morning he fetched Enker and gave the sty-ward half a penny for his keep. He thacked the pig on the arse and bade him choose his way. Enker followed him.

  ‘How’d you come to be a swineherd?’ asked Longfreke.

  ‘Hab bade me redeem Enker and set him free, for Hab went far away,’ said Will.

  ‘Your friends leave without farewells,’ said Mad. ‘We should look to our silver.’

  ‘I mayn’t help if Enker chooses to follow us,’ said Will. ‘He does no harm.’

  He hadn’t no sooner spoke than the boar eked his step and went ahead.

  ‘First the pig chose to follow us,’ said Mad, ‘and now we choose to follow the pig.’

  ‘Behold his great bollocks,’ said Sweetmouth, who stared at the bristly behind of the boar. ‘With knackers like that, a man might go about the world shot-free.’

  The air was cooler than for many days. A light wind blew from the west and made the corn ripple. Small whirled clouds glode in the sky. As they fared over the wold of Avon they saw a long hill rise steeply at the land’s brink. Longfreke said it was the Wiltshire downs, that led to Salisbury. It truly seemed that Enker led them. He struck dust from the road with his shod hooves and only stinted when the bowmen broke to rest.

  Each time a lark rose over a cornfield and sang, Mad sang back in Welsh, and the folk who weeded would look up. Mad made wreaths of golds and poppies for the bowmen to wear, and caught butterflies till he had a heap of them, then let them go at once, and a packle of hues flew from his hand. Sweetmouth wondered aloud that Dickle the fighter should turn out to be so fearful a baby in the end, and to fear, of all things, the fairest thing in the world.

  Otherwhiles they spoke with those they met, and otherwhiles ne spoke, or spoke and were not spoken back to. It seemed they went among two kinds of folk, those that dwelt there, and those like them that fared south. The first kind were harder and more wary and frightened than any they’d met till then. They hid their faces and kept their doors shut and bore likenesses of the Mother of God and St Michael and fell to their knees to bid beads in the field in the sun. They bode on something, and beheld the bowmen go by like they were the beginning of it. They told tales of qualm that the bowmen ne believed, that it was come to Bristol, that London sicked, that it was everywhere in Kent, that a host of French soldiers had come up the Avon to Chippenham in boats and burned it, that the Fiend went about Wiltshire, now as a boar, now as a goat, that a two-headed witch in a white dress rode a black horse along the highway at night.

  The other kind went laughing on horseback in bright clothes, with pipes and gitterns on their backs and apes and aquerns on their shoulders and hawks on their wrists. There were carts drawing bundles of cerecloth, white wooden posts with red bars and heaps of wooden shields. Some went in velvet, some in leather, and they cast behind them date stones and nutshells and cake crumbs. There were maids with bare heads, and high-born fellows who’d reddened their cheeks. When they beheld the bowmen, they beheld them like to their bowmanship was but a game they played, and their true kind other.

  MY PRIORITY IN the matter of Dickle was salvation; my own. Certainly Dickle had expired before I pretended to hear him, and that is the prime defence of my conduct; I could not have assisted in a final act of contrition, had he desired to make one, as his spirit had already departed.

  Despite the exhausting events of the day, I was insomniate. When I eventually slept, I hallucinated that I had paid a constructor to crucify me. The cross was erected in the desert, in the court of an edifice fabricated of nigrous, granular material. A frigid wind agitated pennants on the turrets. The sun was reflected in the wings of falcons and pelicans circling in the air. I apprehended that the pennants and the birds were in fact flames, independent of the source of their ignition. I clamoured to the constructor to liberate me, to extract the nails from my hands. He was seated at the base of the cross, manually excavating the humus without apparent purpose or progress. He was unconscious of my presence, despite the volume of my voice and my desperation. I observed that above his simple tunic, where his head should have been, was a perfect sphere, without protusions or orifices of any kind; he had no apparatus to sense my existence and my agony was, to him, inaudible and invisible.

  I woke, perspiring. I remembered an object in my late father’s possession, acquired in one of the Hanseatic ports: an ivory sphere comprising two hemispheres conjoined so exactly that it was impossible to detect the line of juncture. Counter-rotating the hemispheres, they parted to reveal a cavity in each. Inside the first, sculpted in miniature, was a narrative of depravity: an avaricious blasphemer is portrayed killing his rival, stealing his money and fornicating with his spouse, then descending into the infernal orifice, where he is impaled on the demonic trident. In the other hemisphere, the same person is depicted donating money to the poor, assisting the sick and performing solitary devotions, to be admitted subsequently into the eternal presence of the divine. It is fabricated so that the central figure in each narrative is bisected; one assumes that once the sphere is reassembled, these two demi-humans are united into a single entire human. But the opacity of the ivory is such that the complete human, in his contradictory nature, may never be observed, only imagined, and one may observe the person’s malicious aspect, or their benevolent one, but never the two concurrently.

  As an infant I pondered less over my inability to perceive the entire human, completed yet invisible within the ivory sphere; my major concern was with the predicament of the homunculus himself, conscious of his contradictory nature, yet conscious too of the fact that his complexity was invisible, and none might ever observe more than a fraction of his essence.

  I reflected on Dickle as I prepared to depart Melksham. It was Softly, not I, who damned Dickle from the point of view of his comrades, if not God’s, by revealing his secret, the sole crime, in their eyes, graver for a man than to have a feminine nature: to be terrorised by a woman’s reproductive organs. Why, then, does the sense remain with me that I in some form traduced this violent, aggressive man? He had not hesitated to kill Cess’s father. He was not concerned by Cess’s suffering or her rape by his friends; his horror was in reaction to the possibility of congress, of union with Cess – the idea, he said, made him incomplete. ‘Ne whole’ were the English words. Dickle, I conclude, lacked conviction in the integrity of his own substance; violence was necessary to him to assert his independent existence to others, and to himself, to declare and separate his essence from all other humans. But with women he perceived an element – or the demon who possessed him made him perceive an element – that menaced his isolation. I am sure he would have been capable of any act of pure violence towards Cess except that one act of violation, which I suspect seemed to him less a demonstration of his power over her than a momentary diminution of himself, forcing him for that instant to accept that he was not one creature, but half a creature, and that he could only achieve completion by the absolute negation of the demi-human he had been, by enclosing and being enclosed by his gender opposite, becoming complex, hermetic, like the remainder.

  Judith, Marc, on reflection I judge it probable that you detected my attraction to Judith and resolved to tolerate it as the imbecility of a demented senior, on condition I did not transgress from internal desire to action. I did not do so. Absolve me, if you are magnanimous, of my fatuousity.

  ON THE WAY to Westbury, Will Quate interrogated me on the nature of romantic love as practised by the nobility, and why Bernadine had abandoned he
r nuptials so precipitately.

  I dismounted so as to speak more convivially. The splendid vigour of his honest, inquiring countenance, combined with the illusion of social unity conferred by the common direction of our movement, stimulated me to abandon any concession to his ignorance. I described the Rose, and Lancelot and Guinevere; I alluded to the cult of difficulty, of how the essence of courtly romance lay in the incompatibility of irresistible desire and impossible obstacles in the way of its satisfaction. I recounted how the resolution of this contradiction lay in the cultivation of a form of secular religion based on romance, with worship, martyrs and relics, with poets for priests and the promise of paradise as its conclusion.

  Presenting this in English without a single French or Latin expression exhausted me, and I was confused when, as if proceeding logically from his prior utterances, he said he had last confessed three days previously, to the priest in his vill.

  If he’d offended God in some minor form since then, I said, it could be addressed by a priest at the next pause in our itinerary.

  I might as well have offered to hear his confession. He responded by recounting a series of provocations to his conscience, none of them particularly infamous. On his first night away, he said, he had touched lips with a person other than his intended. He had battered the innocent citizens of Chippenham, without justification, when they defended their urb. He had joined Hayne’s company, despite being advised in advance that they maintained a female French captive whom they had raped and abducted. The premature death of one of his comrades in demonic circumstances, he concluded, proved that the archers were subject to a divine malediction.

  These matters may veritably have made Will Quate anxious, as he insisted they did, but the dominant note in his discourse was not anxiety; it was ire. An event or events had occurred to transform his previous phlegmatic character to choleric. He was furious and turbulent. When we spoke it was as if he desired sincerely to confess to certain crimes, while ascribing culpability for those crimes to others.