London (80 page)

Ducket took his time. He had watched the guests arriving, and had waited. He did not want to meet anyone when he approached the house; if Silversleeves or Bull caught sight of him, he would certainly be thrown out. He would let them get started first.

There was another reason why he allowed himself to pause. These might be his last moments of freedom. He did not know exactly why Tiffany had summoned him, but he feared the worst. Silversleeves or a convent: that was what the fat girl had said. Why all these people were arriving he did not know but no doubt he would soon find out.

He had wondered if Silversleeves would be there, and had come prepared. The knife was concealed, stuck in his belt under his shirt. As soon as he was sure how things stood, he would use it.

Silversleeves must die. If possible he would follow him out and do it somewhere discreetly, but if, for some reason, he had to, he would do it here. As for his own fate, he shrugged. I’ll swing, he thought grimly.

He was just contemplating this when he saw a latecomer hurrying to the door. It was the priest Bull had invited. And now, with a shock, it seemed to him that he understood. “My God, he’s going to marry them right away,” he muttered. The company were gathered to witness it. His heart beating hard, he hastened to the kitchen door.

He could hear the sound of voices as he followed the fat girl up the familiar stairs. She had given him an old gown of the cook’s and a little linen cap to hide his give-away hair. He carried a platter of food as well. Fortunately he was clean shaven, so if he kept his head down and stayed at the back of the room, people would probably assume he was a serving girl.

At the top of the stairs they paused. The fat girl stood in the doorway, as a signal to Tiffany. Looking past her, Ducket could see that there were at least twenty people in the room.

Then Tiffany came over. She slipped round the fat girl, and a second later, Ducket found himself gazing into her face. She looked pale, her eyes a little frightened.

“Thank God you’ve come.” She was trembling. “I told father I didn’t want to marry Silversleeves. But he said . . .”

“I know. A convent. Don’t worry. It’ll be all right.”

“You don’t quite understand.”

“Tiffany.” Her father’s voice was calling.

“Tell me,” her eyes gazed into his searchingly, earnestly, “tell me Geoffrey Ducket – I have to ask, you see – do you love me? I mean, could you? You see . . .” He cut her short.

“Enough to die for you,” he promised. It was the truth.

She was about to say more, but her father’s voice was heard again. Closer. She gave a desperate little shrug, turned, moved quickly round the fat girl and stepped forward to meet him. A second later they had moved away.

Ducket entered the room. No one seemed to be looking at him. He edged forward. He saw Silversleeves, standing a few paces in front of the table on which the astrolabe lay. Just in front of him, he also saw James Bull, and silently cursed. Another figure who could recognize him. Fortunately however, an alderman and his wife stood between himself and these two. Keeping his head down, he was able to get closer. Holding the platter in his left hand, he reached under the folds of his dress for the dagger. He had it. He wasn’t taking any chances. He prepared to make his rush.

Tiffany and her father had drawn a little apart from their guests for a moment and were standing close by the window. Though her father had looked at her enquiringly, it was Tiffany who had begun the conversation.

“Father, you said that if I could not bring myself to marry Silversleeves, I might choose another in the room?”

“I did.”

“There is a man in the room of whom you have a low opinion. Nor have we ever spoken about him as a husband. And yet, Father, I truly love him. Will you allow me to marry even him? For if not, I shall have to go to the convent.”

Bull glanced around. The only man who seemed to fit the description was James Bull. Could his daughter really have fallen in love with the clumsy fellow? It was certainly a disappointment.

“You are sure? Rather than the convent?”

“Yes.”

He shrugged. At least, he thought, he’s honest. “Very well,” he sighed.

“It is Ducket,” she said. And pointed.

“What?” Bull’s face was red. His bellow shook the room. The whole company had turned, to follow his gaze.

Ducket went pale. They were looking at him. He had been recognized. He clenched the hidden knife. There was nothing for it. Before they threw him out he must strike. He started towards Silversleeves, pushing past the alderman in his way.

And then something happened.

With a roar of rage, Bull turned upon Tiffany and, swinging his large arm, struck her face with the open flat of his hand so hard that she seemed to fly from him like a wounded bird. There was a general gasp.

Then a cry, as Tiffany, spinning away, crashed against the open window, lost her balance, and fell out.

“My God!” Bull, suddenly ashen, leaped to the window. The whole room seemed to surge forward, as Tiffany, with a faint cry, dropped like a bundle of clothes the thirty feet into the waters of the Thames below.

The sequence of events that followed lasted only a matter of seconds from beginning to end, yet, to most of those present, they seemed to happen rather slowly.

Tiffany’s dress had lessened the impact of her fall and she was only briefly submerged. Though stunned as she came up, she could see that one of the bridge’s great piers was only yards away and she struggled desperately to reach it before the current took her to the point where the waters began their irresistible rush into the channel. She was vaguely aware of a voice far above crying – “Hold on” – as she managed to seize the long riverweeds that grew upon its sides. But already the current was pulling, tugging at her dress. The weeds were slippery. Frantically she held on, but knew she could not do so for long. Yards away, the churning waters roared and foamed; the current seemed to be urging her, ever more insistently, to join it in the headlong ride to death.

Above, in the big room, all was confusion. What should they do? Bull was struggling to get out of his heavy robe; his wife, about to lose a husband as well as a daughter, was gasping for breath. Silversleeves, with a look of deep piety, sank to his knees and began to pray, while James Bull, waving his arms wildly, cried out: “A rope! Fetch a rope!” Clambering across the room, he knocked over the table, stamping, in his haste, upon the astrolabe and crushing its delicate mechanism entirely.

But it was Ducket who, dropping the knife and ignoring Silversleeves, ran to the window and launched himself out into the air just as, below, Tiffany’s fingers lost their grip.

A second later he followed her, into the raging torrent.

Bull the merchant had many faults, but ingratitude was not one of them. Nor, indeed, was moral cowardice.

Some hours later, when Tiffany was sufficiently recovered to talk, he spent some time at her bedside, listening while she spoke to him earnestly. Then he went down to the kitchen where, in dry clothes, Ducket was sitting by the fire, and asked the apprentice to accompany him to the big room.

“I have thanked you for saving Tiffany’s life, which you certainly did, and I do so again,” he began. “But I now believe, after talking to Tiffany, that I owe you an unqualified apology for doubting your character. I ask your forgiveness.” He paused. “It seems also that my daughter is very anxious to marry you instead of that rogue Silversleeves. Her judgement is obviously better than mine.” And now he smiled. “The question is, Ducket, would you consider it?”

Ducket and Tiffany were married a week later. It was a happy occasion. Whittington stood beside the bridegroom. Chaucer made a speech.

The rich merchant, before giving his daughter to the foundling, had made one stipulation. “Since I have no son, and you will enjoy a large fortune from me, I ask one thing: that you, Ducket, should take the name of Bull.” To which the couple had readily agreed. It was therefore Geoffrey and Tiffany Bull who now started their new life together, in the pleasant house already picked for them, on Oyster Hill by London Bridge.

One other happy event also took place a month later. On the eve of her daughter’s wedding to Carpenter, Dame Barnikel made an announcement.

“I’m going to marry James.”

She had decided she could make something of him; and James Bull for his part, it seemed, had concluded that, if not the fortune he had dreamed of, the George Tavern was a good and solid business. “He’s going to become a brewer,” she told the guild, and they did not dare to argue. And so the Bull Brewery was born.

As for the prospect of being a bride again, she became quite girlish about it.

1386

The idea was Chaucer’s

He had been worried about his friend Bull of late. Tiffany was married; two years ago, Bull’s wife had died. The merchant was feeling rather lonely. Once or twice Chaucer had got the impression that his old friend might have been drinking. And so, in the spring of 1385, he had been delighted when fate provided him with a new official position, and the perfect excuse to take Bull out of himself. “You’re coming with me,” he said. “To Kent.” For Chaucer had just become a Justice of the Peace.

The role of Justice of the Peace had been evolving for some time. It was a good, commonsense system, in which local gentlemen of the shire, aided by professional sergeants-at-law to advise on the legal niceties, presided over the county courts; and Geoffrey Chaucer was eligible because as a royal servant he had been granted a small estate in Kent.

Bull had finally agreed, but before he left, there had been one important decision to make. Who should manage his affairs while he was gone? Since marrying Tiffany, the foundling had exhibited a surprising aptitude for business and before long Bull had found real pleasure in teaching him all he knew, but one thing had displeased the merchant. Though the young man had agreed to dispense with his own name of Ducket, and take that of Bull, he had refused to join the Mercers Guild, despite the fact that Bull could have got him in. “The Grocers Guild is where I served my apprenticeship,” he declared, “and it’s the trade I know.” Nothing would change his loyalty. The fact that the Grocers were currently running the city and the Mercers were not did not make Bull any happier, and Bull was not sure he wanted to put his affairs entirely in the younger man’s hands just yet. The solution he hit upon, however, suited everybody. He called in Whittington.

Whittington was in his thirties now, a man of substance already and a member of the Mercers Guild. He and young Ducket had always been friends. “I want you to watch over my affairs jointly while I’m away,” he instructed them. “You can always send for me if you’re in any doubt.” Feeling confident in the arrangement, he had departed cheerfully enough.

How delightful it was to be in Kent. Just for a moment, when he had met the justices at Rochester Castle, Bull had been afraid he might not enjoy himself. They were a large party, who, apart from the five sergeants-at-law, were mostly courtiers or members of the greatest landowning families in the shire. Rich as he was, Bull had never moved in these circles; but Chaucer came immediately to his rescue. “Gentlemen,” he smiled, “I am such a newcomer to this county myself that I asked my dear friend here to ride with me and guide me. He was born a Bull of Bocton, an ancient Kent family, I believe.” The effect was instantaneous. “Been here longer than we have,” one landowner declared. “It must be your brother I know,” smiled another. By the end of that day, they let him feel as if they had known him all his life.

As Chaucer had foreseen Bull had no time to brood, for they were constantly on the move. There were investigations, into the administration of an heiress’s estate, or the land grants of a monastery; they carefully checked the coastal defences in case of French attack. But above all, it was the simple business of administering justice, in towns, in villages and on manors all over the county, that delighted Bull and his friend the poet.

A tax-collector had been beaten up, a yeoman’s barn set on fire, a miller robbed of his flour, a peasant had refused labour to his lord. They came before the court, stated their case and were questioned in simple English. Local juries provided information, local customs were observed, and justices like Chaucer handed down verdicts. Yet the greatest joy for Bull was to discuss the day’s events with the poet in a tavern or manor house in the evening.

Chaucer was a little portlier of late; his goatee beard contained a few grey hairs; his face and hooded eyes were sometimes red. He looked, and was, a comfortable fellow. And he missed nothing. “Did you notice the wart on that friar’s nose?” he would suddenly ask. “That reeve had been making love to the miller’s wife – did you see how she looked at him?” He would chuckle. “The more despicable they are, the more you seem to like them,” Bull once chided him. But Chaucer only shook his head. “I love them all,” he said simply. “Can’t help it.”

Yet, as time went by, there was one thing that troubled Bull. Strangely enough, it did not concern his own affairs, but those of Chaucer. He was so respectful of his friend’s accomplishments, however, that for a long time he did not dare to bring it up. His chance came, at last, in April.

The two men had paid a visit to Bocton, where Bull’s brother had welcomed them with his family, and it was as they rode in the warm spring sun down the Canterbury road the following morning that Chaucer broached his idea.

“It’s an idea for a huge new work,” he explained. “I’ve written so much conventional courtly verse. But for a long time now I’ve wanted to try something completely different. Look at all these folk we’ve been seeing day by day in court. The yeomen, the millers, the friars, the fishwives. What if I could let them speak, as well as the courtly folk.” He grinned. “A great big work, a huge stew, a feast.”

“But how do you make the speech of the common folk into a poem?” Bull objected.

“Ah,” Chaucer cried, “I thought of that. What if each one of them told a tale, a little story like the Italian author Boccaccio uses. As they tell the stories, they also reveal themselves. Don’t you see the neatness of it?”