The Clerkenwell Tales by Peter Ackroyd (good short books .txt) 📕

London after the fall of Troy, as all the historians suggested, could this be an emblem of New Troy lingering into the present with its own baleful history? The physician was filled with sensations of power and of purpose as he looked upon it; it had already completed its destiny, and now persisted in time through its indomitable will. So it attracted secret men like Miles Vavasour and Geoffrey de Calis. A rotten nut is called a deaf nut. Barren corn is known as deaf corn. This was deaf stone. Whatever dark business was conducted within its walls, it would never be whispered abroad.

Gunter stayed by his hidden point of vantage, while an hour passed. The under-sheriff was the first to leave, entering his chair in the flare of many torches. Geoffrey de Calis followed, in the company of a man whom Gunter did not recognise. Behind them walked Miles Vavasour who turned and waited for his horse beside the great wooden door. He had about him an air of expectancy, and he mounted lightly. Gunter quietly untethered his horse and decided to go after him. Vavasour turned up Addle Hill, and Gunter realised that he was not riding home when he turned eastward into Carter Lane. The gates of the city were closed but he seemed to be making his way towards Aldersgate; the streets were very quiet, and Gunter made sure that he kept his distance. He had thought of tying rags to his horse’s hooves, but he was content now to avoid cobbles and loose stones. He looked up at the universe of light which guided his way; he could see the stars in the highest celestial sphere, and was comforted by their brightness. There was one order which did not decay.

Vavasour had ridden down St. Martin’s towards the gate; it was closed, of course, and barred with chains which were fixed across the road. So he turned east down St. Anne’s Lane and then north into Noble Street at the corner of which, as Gunter could see, a section of the wall was being reconstructed. The workmen removed the ladders and scaffolding each night, for fear of thieves, so there was a narrow gap or rent in the structure. Vavasour had settled his horse for a moment, whispering in its ear, and then had leapt beyond the wall. Gunter murmured to himself the hunter’s cry, “So! Ho!” and followed him. He rode over the wall just as the sergeant was making his way down Little Britain towards Smithfield.

There was a wide path there between the priory church and the hospital, where sand had been laid for the easy conveyance of wagons and carts; it glowed in the moonlight, with the turrets and eaves of the surrounding buildings casting strange shadows across it. The posts by each side of the road, where the horses were tethered in daylight, seemed like stakes for the condemned. The physician always associated Smithfield with death – the animals being led to slaughter, the guilty men riding to the rope, the sick approaching their end in the hospital itself. But he knew that each part of the city had its own trouble and its own tainted air.

Vavasour was riding across the open market towards Cow Lane and Clerkenwell and, by the time he had reached the Fleet, Gunter knew his destination. Turnmill Street was a notorious stew haunted by gestours and lechours, roarers and bawds. By the time Gunter rode down the narrow thoroughfare, Vavasour’s horse was being kept by an old huckster who sold second-hand clothing by day.

Gunter dismounted and gave the man a groat. “Where has he gone?”

“To see the Wife of Bath.”

Dame Alice, familiarly known as the Wife of Bath, was the most notorious procuratrix in the city. She ran a tavern in Turnmill Street called the Broken Fiddle; it was known by everyone as the Broken Filly, however, because of the nature of its trade. The physician had been visited by some of Alice’s clients, who had contracted the pox known otherwise as the brand of Venus or the love-lick.

Dame Alice greeted Miles Vavasour in her usual fashion. “What! Are you here? Sir Robert Run-About?” She wore a kirtle of red velvet, with a girdle of gold-work around her waist; she had a caul over her hair embroidered with jewels, and a red hood behind her neck. “You have come for a sweet hole, have you, sir? Are you wanting a scabbard for your dagger?”

Dame Alice had pursued her trade for many years, despite manifold punishments and injuries. She had been placed in the compter; she had been exhibited in the stocks and on the stool; she had been paraded through the streets in a striped hood and beaver hat as tokens of her profession. In more recent times, however, she had been permitted to establish her tavern, or her “shop” as she called it, outside the walls; in any case she now had too many secrets to be prosecuted in open court. It was said that the monasteries and the nunneries would be emptied if she told all she knew.

“You old fetart, you lusk, what will it be with you tonight? What raging damsel will be your delight?”

Dame Alice had acquired a reputation for the contempt which she showed to her customers; they accepted it as part of their humiliation. She had many words for men like Miles Vavasour who came in search of young women – lorrel, loricart, lowt, slow-back, hedge-creeper, looby, lobcock, crafty Jack, long lubber, hopharlot – each with its own range of allusion and association.

“You are in high kick, I see, Miles Rakehell. You lift your leg like a dunghill dog. Well, I have a young fair one for you.” Dame Alice knew his tastes very well. “Eleven summers. Rose. I call her Rose-a-ruby because she smells like camomile.” She was standing on an old wooden staircase, much rubbed and discoloured with the tread of a thousand shoes, and she beckoned him upward.