A Burnable Book. Bruce Holsinger
I felt a twinge of misgiving. However innocent on its face, no request from Chaucer was ever straightforward. ‘Why not ask her yourself?’
‘She and Philippa are inseparable. Katherine won’t see me.’
‘So you’re asking me to approach her?’
He took a small sip.
‘Why me?’ I said.
‘How to put it?’ He pretended to search for words, his hands flitting about on the table. ‘This job needs a subterranean man, John. A man who knows this city like the lines in his knuckles, its secrets and surprises. All those shadowed corners and blind alleyways where you do your nasty work.’
I gazed fondly at him, thinking of Simon, and so much else. It was one of the peculiarities of our intimacy that Chaucer seemed to appreciate talents no one else would value in a friend. Here comes John Gower, it was murmured at Westminster and the Guildhall; hide your ledgers. Hide your thoughts. For knowledge is currency. It can be traded and it can be banked, and more secretly than money. The French have a word for informers: chanteurs, ‘singers’, and information is a song of sorts. A melody poured in the ears of its eager recipients, every note a hidden vice, a high crime, a deadly sin. Or some kind of illicit antiphon, its verses whispered among opposed choirs of the living and the dead.
We live in a hypocritical age. An age that sees bishops preaching abstinence while running whores. Pardoners peddling indulgences while seducing wives. Earls pledging fealty while plotting treason. Hypocrites, all of them, and my trade is the bane of hypocrisy, its worth far outweighing its perversion. I practise the purest form of truthtelling.
Quite profitably, too. The second son of a moderately wealthy knight has some choices: the law, the royal bureaucracy, Oxford or Cambridge, the life of a monk or a priest. Yet I would rather have trapped grayling in the Severn for a living than taken holy orders, and it was clear that my poetry would never see the lavishments from patrons that Chaucer’s increasingly enjoyed. Yet I shall never forget the thrill I felt when that first coin of another man’s vice fell into my lap, and I realized what I had – and how to use it. Since then I have become a trader in information, a seller of suspicion, a purveyor of foibles and the hidden things of private life. I work alone and always have, without the trappings of craft or creed.
John Gower. A guild of one.
‘You can’t be direct with her about it,’ Chaucer was saying. ‘This is a woman who takes the biggest cock in the realm between her legs. She’s given Lancaster three bastards at last count – or is it four?’ He waited, gauging my reaction.
‘What is this book, Geoffrey? What does it look like? What’s in it?’
His gaze was unfocused and vague. ‘To be honest with you, John, I don’t know. What I do know is that this book could hurt me.’ He blinked and looked at some spot on the wattle behind me. Then, in a last whisper of French, ‘It could cost me my life.’
Our eyes locked, and I wondered in that instant, as I would so often in the weeks to come, what price such a book might extract from my oldest friend. He broke the tension with one of his elvish smiles. ‘If you can do this for me, John, get me this book, I’ll be greatly in your debt.’
As you are so deeply in mine, he did not say; nor did he need to, and in his position neither would I have. I left Monksblood’s that morning bound to perform this ‘small favour’, as Chaucer had called it, for the one man in all the world I could never refuse. The man who knew my own darkest song.
Gropecunt Lane, Ward of Cheap
Eleanor Rykener grunted, spat, wiped her lips. The friar covered his shrivelled knob. Wouldn’t meet her eyes, of course. Franciscans, they never liked to look. He dropped his groats on the straw. ‘Why thank you, Brother Michael,’ she said, her voice a sullen nip. The friar stared coldly at some spot on her neck, then shrugged on his cowl, edged around the old mare, and left the stall.
When she had dressed, Eleanor stepped out into the light rain, looking down toward the stone cross before St Pancras. The friar wouldn’t give that a glance either as he slunk around the corner of the churchyard toward Soper Lane. She raised her face to the sky, cleansing his piety from her tongue.
‘Regular as these little oinkers here.’ Mary Potts leaned against a post, gesturing to a dozen pigs nosing street muck.
Eleanor tossed her gossip a tired smile. ‘And never has the good grace to render me confession after I grant him service.’
They stood in silence for a while, watching the flow of late-afternoon traffic up along Cheapside, the creak of old wheels, the low calls of sheep, the urgings of hucksters, though the din seemed always distant from the ladies of Gropecunt Lane, a quiet byway of leased horsestalls and abandoned shopfronts that absorbed sound the way a dry rag absorbs ale, and as central as St Paul’s to the human business of London. Every now and then this business would be theirs, as some desiring man, face to the ground, mind on slit, would make the turn and find a maudlyn to take his groats and squirt. Despite the lane’s reputation, the girls kept things tidy, raking the dirt and pavers themselves, cleaning up after animal and man alike. It was their own small piece of the city, where jakes plucked coin from their purses and maudlyns tucked it into theirs, the ordinances be damned. A simple thing.
‘Afternoon, m’pretties!’
Eleanor turned. Joan Rugg lifted her skirts as she hopped from stone to stone in a vain attempt to avoid the mud.
‘What now what now what now,’ Mary Potts murmured.
With a final grunt, Joan heaved herself on to the pavers fronting the stalls and straightened her dress, a shapeless thing of stained wool. The Dun Bell, Joan’s girls called their bawd, with three chins stacked against her neck, lips full and always moist, beady eyes that moved more quickly than any other part of her, and a mass of matted hair entwined through the band of a wide hat she never removed. This, a splendid circle of leather and wool adorned with flowers of faded silk, had been given to her by a lover in her youth, she liked to recall. On that misty day its perch lent her large form an air of botanical mystery, as if the viewer were approaching a mountaintop garden above the clouds, or some strange, Edenic island in the sea. ‘You ladies seen our Agnes?’ she asked.
‘Not today,’ said Mary Potts.
‘Thought you sent her up Westminster on Tuesday,’ said Eleanor, suddenly concerned. As far as she knew Agnes Fonteyn had been consorting with one of the king’s substewards, a long-time jake who would request Agnes’s company for a few days at a time during royal absences.
‘Didn’t come through.’ Joan raised her sleeve to scratch at her forearm. ‘But I had a particular request for her this morning, from a fine gentleman of the Mercery. And a procuratrix’d like to make arrangements, right?’
‘You talked to her mother down Southwark?’ Mary asked.
‘Sign of the Pricking Bishop,’ Eleanor added quickly, naming a common house in the stews where Agnes’s mother had long peddled flesh.
Joan scoffed. ‘Would’ve had to wait in line a half day to get a word in. That whore’s swyving makes her daughter look like St Margaret.’
‘Did you try her sister?’ Eleanor said. ‘Lives up Cornhull.’
Joan wagged her head. ‘Took a peek in her fancy house, asked about a bit in Broad Street, but no sight of her ladyship.’
A dungcart turned up from St Pancras on the way to the walls, banded wheels groaning under the weight, the waste of man and beast souring the air. When the clatter receded, Joan turned back to them. ‘Can’t have my maudlyns vanishing on me, not with Lents about to pass, appetites built