London (72 page)

The lawyer could not have been more obliging. If he remembered Ducket’s crime, he gave no sign of it. With a goblet of mulled wine in his hand, he went over to the little grocer, and in no time at all the two men were so deep in conversation about abstruse matters that Ducket was able to slip away without even being noticed. Several times, however, when he glanced over at Fleming, he saw upon his master’s thin face a look of delight which told him that, tonight at least, the grocer had truly found a man of education.

He did not know what hour it was when he was awoken by the noise. It was nothing much: just the sound of a door being scraped open. A door that should not be opened. He sat up with a start.

Moments later Ducket was out in the yard, moving silently towards the store. The door was ajar and there was light coming from inside. He crept closer, wishing that he had a weapon. Cautiously he looked in.

It was Fleming.

He had not spoken to his master after Silversleeves had left. He had seen him talking to one or two other people, and he had appeared perfectly normal; indeed, he had seemed rather cheerful. Once he had seen him go out with a tall fellow who, Ducket assumed, wanted directions to Bankside. He thought that the grocer had turned in later with the rest of the household. Yet something must have happened. How else could he explain what he saw now?

Fleming was in a trance. He was standing quite alone, facing the door. But although he was staring straight at Ducket, he did not seem to see him. There was a lamp on one of the sacks. Fleming’s hands were cupped in front of him, and filled with precious peppercorns. At last he became aware of Ducket and gazed at him with a look of rapt ecstasy, as though he were a visiting angel. Then he spoke.

“Do you know what these are?” he asked.

“Peppercorns,” the astonished apprentice replied.

“Yes. They are peppercorns. And are they precious?”

“Of course. Most expensive item we carry.”

“Ah.” He nodded. Then, slowly but deliberately he opened his hands and let them spill on to the floor. Ducket was horrified. But Fleming only smiled. “Worthless,” he said. “Worthless.” And as Ducket came forward to start picking them up, he took him by the arm with a confidential urgency.

“But,” the grocer now whispered to his apprentice, “what if a man were to discover the secret of the universe? What would peppercorns be then?” Ducket had to confess he did not know. “But I do,” said Fleming softly. And then gazing at him in the faint light: “Is my wife a fine woman?” Ducket agreed that she was. “And isn’t this a fine place?” With a sweep of his thin hand he indicated the whole of his wife’s domain in the surrounding shadows. “It is indeed. And all hers.” He shook his head and gave a strange little laugh. “Nothing,” he said, apparently addressing the sacks around him. Then, suddenly staring at the boy with a wild look: “Soon, Ducket, you shall see such wonders.”

After this, he stood gazing into space with such a vacant expression in his eyes that Ducket hardly liked to interrupt him, and stole back to bed.

The next morning the grocer seemed perfectly normal, and Ducket did not think it was his place to mention the incident to anyone. But he wondered, all the same, what it might mean.

It sometimes puzzled Tiffany, and secretly hurt her, that Ducket so seldom came to see her, despite the promises he had once made. One kiss, she thought, and he almost vanishes. Was it so terrible? Though she was always modest, she had resolved to kiss other men, if only, she thought, to get better at it.

As she neared thirteen, her father had ensured that a succession of men came to the house on London Bridge. Though Whittington, alas, had found a wife, he brought several other young mercers of good family; three aldermen had sons of the right age; there was an Italian vintner, a rich German widower, a Hanseatic merchant, who rolled his eyes and was soon dispatched, and at least a dozen other suitable fellows. There was even a young noble, heir to a huge North Country estate; but though he was handsome, both father and daughter agreed he was too stupid.

Indeed, as the months went by, a new relationship had evolved between Bull and his daughter. Naturally, there were many things she preferred to discuss with her mother; but while she always treated her father with a meek respect, Bull was surprised to find himself sharing confidences with the girl. He had never set much store by the opinion of women before, and certainly not that of a mere girl; yet now, having no other child to dispose of, and having given her so much choice in the matter, he became fascinated by what was passing in her mind. “Do you know what she really thinks of young so-and-so?” he would say to his wife proudly. Each time he brought in a new prospect, he awaited her verdict with curiosity. “When the time finally comes, I’m sure she’ll make a good choice, guided by me,” he said. Meanwhile, he found himself in no particular hurry to give the girl away. “They’re none of them good enough for her,” he sometimes declared.

One suitor, however, he continued to look upon with more favour. This was Silversleeves.

The strategy of the young lawyer had been extremely proper. “I must tell you,” he had said to Bull, “that though my family is ancient, my fortune is only modest.” It was generations since the family had moved from the old Silversleeves house below St Paul’s. His widowed mother, who had died recently, had only inhabited a tenement in Paternoster Row, just west of the cathedral. “But,” the young man confessed, “I am ambitious.” As they both knew, in the last decades, the study and profession of law in London had started to rival the Church as a path of power. Many young men nowadays, preferring to marry honestly rather than take vows of celibacy, were following this route, and there were lawyers now side by side with bishops in the highest offices. “Your daughter is adorable,” he would say to Tiffany’s mother. “Should I ever find favour in her eyes, I should strive night and day to make her happy.”

But wisely he also confided to Bull: “I admire your generosity, sir, in allowing your daughter to choose. But between ourselves, if I could not earn your blessing, I should not feel comfortable in trying to recommend myself to Tiffany.” To Bull’s wife, every few weeks, he brought a thoughtful gift.

To Tiffany herself, he was an agreeable friend, but it was natural that the girl should admire him. His fortune might not, as he said, be large, but he was always dressed in the finest cloth, and he had a fine horse. He could talk about any subject. He could be amusing. And when he spoke about the affairs of the day with her father, she could see that Bull respected his opinion.

“He’s certainly the most intelligent of all the men I’ve met,” she told her mother one day.

“And?”

“I don’t know. I think I’m too young,” she replied.

Tiffany hardly knew how to put it herself. Something, perhaps, was missing. When she read the romances of knights dying for the love of their ladies, she experienced a strange sense of excitement: yet she hardly knew whether this sensation belonged to adulthood or was merely childish. Once, speaking of a romance she had read, she asked her mother: “Do such men really exist?”

“Well,” her mother paused before replying. “Have you ever met such a man?”

“No.”

“You mustn’t be too disappointed, then,” the older woman said, “if you never do.”

“Then,” Tiffany decided, “I don’t want to marry until I’m at least fifteen.”

As Ducket considered his life, in the early spring of 1379, one thing concerned him: he was seventeen, but he had never had a woman.

He had kissed, to be sure. When it came to wrestling or boxing, he had proved his manhood to his fellow apprentices many times. But when, as they sometimes did, his friends went off to the stews on Bankside, he always made some excuse and left them to it. This was not because he was timid; but the seediness of the place and the risk of disease offended him. Sometimes, as he was healthy and well made, he thought he had noticed women glance at him appraisingly; but he was not quite sure how to approach them.

He could not confide this problem in Fleming, Bull, or even his worldly godfather Chaucer. But one day at the start of April, after they had chanced to meet in the Cheap, he asked the advice of Whittington, who remarked: “I might be able to help you there. Give me a week or two.”

With some excitement, therefore, ten days later, the boy met his friend at a tavern, down behind St Mary-le-Bow. But when he entered the crowded tavern, Whittington met him with a long face. “A delay,” he murmured apologetically. “I’ve been trapped. You’ll have to help me make polite conversation for a while until this person leaves. Then we’ll see what we can do.” And to his chagrin, as Whittington led him to a table, Ducket saw that the cause of the delay was none other than Silversleeves’ cousin, the long-nosed nun from St Helen’s, whom he had once seen at the house on London Bridge. “For God’s sake not a word about what I’m up to,” Whittington whispered.

Ducket found it hard to concentrate. More than once he surreptitiously glanced around to see if he could spot the woman who, he hoped, he was there to meet, but without success. Meanwhile, for the nun’s benefit, Whittington was putting on a display of serious good manners that almost suggested he was on the way to Mass. For her part, Sister Olive asked the boy about himself and something in her smile seemed to indicate approval.

Shortly afterwards she indicated that she wished to leave. Whittington politely escorted her to the door and accompanied her outside. He was gone for a few minutes, presumably taking her up to the West Cheap, and then he returned and sat down. “Sorry about the interruption,” he apologized. Then, with a grin, he turned to Ducket.

“And now, my friend, to other matters. Are you ready for your woman?”

At the doorway, Ducket took his arm: “You’re sure . . .” he began.

“She’s clean. I promise.”

“Have I seen her?”

“I saw you looking around for her,” Whittington laughed. “But she had a good look at you. She likes you.” And he led him into the courtyard outside. There was a small wooden staircase there which led up to a chamber overlooking the little walled orchard. A faint light came from under the door. “Up there, young Ducket,” said Whittington. “The gates to Paradise!” And without another word he strode up the alley.

So this was it. Would he know what to do? Would his manhood fail him? His heart was thumping as he made his way slowly up the stairs, and opened the door to the chamber.

The room was pleasant. There was a thick rush mat on the floor. On the right stood an oak chest, glowing in the soft light from the lamp that rested upon it. On the left, the window shutters were closed. In the middle of the chamber was a four-poster bed piled high with mattress and covers.

And upon the bed, quite naked, with her dark hair now down to her shoulders, lay the slim, pale form of Sister Olive.

It was Whittington who told Bull. In fact he told several people. He could not resist it, not because he meant any harm to Sister Olive but just to annoy her cousin Silversleeves.

Bull was furious. “That nun should be thrown out of her convent,” he cried. “As for Ducket, I’ll have him put in the stocks.” And it was only Chaucer, visiting later that day, who calmed him down.

“My dear friend,” he reminded him, “there are nuns in this city of the deepest devoutness. There are also, at St Helen’s, several women who have no vocation for the religious life but who find themselves in a cloister because their families put them there. If Sister Olive is not perfect, she’s very discreet; and I shall box Whittington’s ears when I see him for giving her away. Be merciful.”

“And Ducket?”

Chaucer smiled.

“From what I hear,” he said, “I should imagine he had a very nice time.”

A few days after this, Silversleeves, passing Ducket in the street, gave him a look that could have killed. Nor did it make it any better when, the next time he called upon Bull, the merchant, biting his lip, remarked: “Always a lot of scurrilous rumours about London, my dear fellow. Never listen to them myself.”

The only person in the household with whom the matter was not discussed was little Tiffany. For a day she could not discover what the shouts and whispers had been about. Her mother looked vague when she asked; no one else would tell. But at last the cook told her; after which, Tiffany considered the matter alone by herself for some time.

So, she thought: he knows. The thought was strangely exciting.

But that summer Tiffany learned that her childhood friend might have moral flaws of an altogether more serious nature. These might never have been suspected, but for a new development that now took place in England.

When the young king’s council, still desperate for money that spring, had gone as usual to the city for help, they had received a rebuff. “We’ve just paid a fortune to get our royal customers back,” the London men pointed out; and the sum they offered the council was quite inadequate. “Other means must be found,” the council decided. And so it was that, when the summer Parliament met, a different expedient was hit upon. “It’s a poll tax,” Silversleeves explained to Tiffany. “The principle’s quite simple. Every adult in England – man or woman, noble, free or serf – will have to pay a tax per head.”

Simple, certainly; but also revolutionary. For the paying of tax in medieval England had always been the privilege of the free minority in society. The citizen of London paid; his poor apprentice did not. A rich miller in the country, if a free man, would pay tax. But the humble serf, once he had rented the lord of the manor his feudal service and paid a few pence to the Church, was quit.

It was true, at the same time, that traditional life in the countryside was changing. In the last generation, since the Black Death, the old feudal system had been splitting at the seams. There was such disruption, and such a labour shortage, that serfs were hiring themselves out as free labourers and acquiring the tenancies of their own farms without much hindrance. And though the authorities had tried, through the hated Statute of Labourers, to stop this movement and to hold down wages, they had only succeeded in angering the peasantry without stopping the process. The old shackles of serfdom were dissolving; the world of free yeoman farmers and wage labour was beginning. But even if, in a way, the general poll tax was just a recognition of this new reality, such logic has never been a good enough reason for a tax. “It’s against custom,” was the cry.