Authors: Bruce Holsinger
“
Enough.
” I stepped away. “How
dare
you threaten me like this?”
He grabbed a pile of cockets from his desk and threw them in the air. The parchments snowed around our heads. His lips curled into a puerile sneer. “Call it a threat if you like. Whatever the case, your position is exceedingly weak. Do not test me, Gower.”
I stared at him, waiting for him to retract the malicious threat behind his words, but his lips seemed frozen in place. “You’ve finally stripped the veil, my friend,” I said, a trembling whisper. “Now you are no better than I am. At last you know what it’s like, to have a man’s soul in your hands.”
The look Chaucer gave me then was the coldest I had ever seen. “Poets don’t traffic in souls. That is the work of priests. The sooner you learn the difference, the better a poet you shall be.” On that cruelest of notes he turned away. “Find the book. Find it, bring it to me, and just maybe you will see your son in England again.”
As I left the customhouse and paced back along the wharfage, I carried Chaucer’s words as a profound weight on my spirit. Yet from our abrasive encounter one deeper question lingered, a question that concerned neither the viability of this deep friendship nor its tenuous basis in our poetry. The question concerned, rather, the young woman on the Moorfields, this alleged French agent murdered over the very book my difficult friend sought with such singular focus—and to whose death he had reacted with such exaggerated surprise that it seemed feigned. It was a question about Geoffrey Chaucer himself, and it had been haunting me for a week and more. A question no longer avoidable.
Could Chaucer kill?
The dust cloud grew as the company approached, massing into a great orb that filled the northern sky, as if God had obliterated a portion of the earth from His sight. Even from that distance the lady could recognize the arms borne by the herald: the livery of the king. The gate, she ordered, was to remain open, the defenses unprepared. Castile is arrived, she told her husband’s men and her servants. Make the castle ready! Open our larders and cellars to his needs! Her orders carried out, the company arrived, to be greeted with the lady’s open arms.
Yet once they had reached the castle gates and their leader stood before her, she realized she had been deceived. This was not King Pedro, nor was her husband among the company. These men wore livery she had never seen, spoke in a language she could not comprehend. The banners of Castile they flung carelessly to the ground.
Their lord, a prince from a northern land, was a hard man, with a pale face that might have been cut from stone. A forked beard fell from his chin like two waterfalls of molten lead, and in him the lady sensed a certain cruelty, a flow of dark intention beneath the rituals of courtesy the situation demanded. He groused loudly of King Pedro’s unpaid war debts and the poor condition of his troops.
The prince had arrived in the company of his younger brother, a duke. Taller by half a head, this lord was a man of few words. He was of nobler bearing than the prince, and seemed almost ashamed by his older brother’s disposition.
For weeks the lords remained in the castle, their troops garrisoned along the walls. The lady learned that a much greater force, thousands strong, was encamped near Burgos, growing hungry and ill as the foreign prince awaited payment of Pedro’s debts. As the unwelcome visit lengthened, the prince let the lady know her place at every opportunity.
Your husband is in my debt, he said. And your husband’s lord, and his lord, and his lord in turn—all are in my debt. All that your husband claims to own shall properly be mine. Mine the harvest gleaned from the earth beneath your feet. Mine the flocks rutting and grazing in these fields. Mine the small treasure guarded in this castle’s hold. And mine—
The prince did not say it, but from the moment of his arrival she had felt it. His eyes upon her constantly, his conversation crudely suggestive, his hand lingering too long upon her own at their moments of formal greeting.
She made sure she was never alone, trailing her daughter with her wherever she went, ordering a maidservant to remain in her bed through the night. She bent her back to please the visitors. There were slaughters to order, hunts to organize, horses to water and feed. Her husband’s senescalo went nearly mad as the soldiers’ demands increased.
The lady called on her villagers to help, appropriating their animals, their grain, their bodily labor to ensure adequate food and drink for the visiting lord and his men. All shall be returned to you in droves, she promised them. They gave willingly, that their lady’s honor might remain intact.
Yet those hardened folk of the Castilian marches, their wisdom deep as the soil, understood what she did not. The darkest law of chivalry.
When a great lord arrives at the home of a lesser, whether his vassal or not, the lesser shall consider all he owns to be the just property of the greater. All should be surrendered to him freely and without objection.
And what the lord does not receive willingly, he is entitled to take by force.
DAY XIV BEFORE KALENDS OF MAY TO NONES OF MAY, 8 RICHARD II
(18 APRIL–7 MAY, 1385)
St. Mary Overey, Southwark
T
wo stories: One of lust, one of murder. One of revelry, of adulterous love, of untroubled joy in the flesh. The other of a young boy’s faith, of treachery, death, and resurrection.
In the first story, a randy student seduces a carpenter’s wife, deceives him with a false prophecy of a second flood, and causes a household disaster. There is also a parish clerk, a fop who seeks the wife’s favors for himself yet wins only a fart as his reward. The tale is told by a miller, who delights in the flaws of every character he portrays.
In the second story, a young chorister hears a sacred song being performed by older boys and vows to learn this gorgeous antiphon on his own. As he moves back and forth through a Jewry, the song fills his throat. The offended Jews conspire against him, causing his murder and throwing his corpse in a privy. As his mother searches for him, the boy is miraculously resurrected. The narrator of this tale is a prioress, a holy woman leading a community of Christian nuns.
Two stories, both scrawled in Chaucer’s loose hand in the quire he had given me at the customhouse. On a first reading no two stories could have been more unlike. The thought of compiling them within a larger work made no sense, yet such was Chaucer’s plan, inspired by the same Giovanni Boccaccio who wrote the tragic romance Chaucer had brought back from Florence.
The more I thought about these stories, though, the more I came to see what, in Chaucer’s bent imagination, they might have in common. Both dealt with the consequences of sin and fallen flesh. Though the prioress’s story more directly concerned death, martyrdom, and persecution, this miller’s tale cast its own shadows: another Noah’s Flood, the degradation of the marital sacrament, hints of sodomy. As art, then, the stories seemed congruent, eerily so. Once again Chaucer had proven himself a superior teller of tales.
Or a compelling liar. I sat back, my spine finding its worn place on the study wall. We had spoken often over the years about the proximity of poetry and deception. To write a great poem, Chaucer insisted, you have to be a greater liar. You must convince your readers that your characters are flesh and blood rather than words on dead skin, that their loves and hatreds and passions are as deep and present as the readers’ own. Your task is to delight, to pleasure, to lift your reader to another sphere of being and then strand him there, floating above the earth and panting for more lines.
This long struggle with my own poetry? Perhaps it’s just that, I thought: I don’t deal in colorful lies, but in plain truths, however coarse and hidden. What need is there for deception when the truth is so much more compelling, so much darker in its attachments?
The truths before me now, though, were hidden beneath an impenetrable veil, despite all the damning facts and obscure information I had accumulated over the years. A prophetic book I hadn’t read and couldn’t find. A murdered woman I didn’t know and couldn’t name. A friend I couldn’t fathom and shouldn’t trust. And all the while a city I thought I’d mastered suddenly strange and alien to me, coiled like a serpent across the river, its tongue whispering a threat I could not comprehend.
Caught up as I was in these clouds of enigma, it took me a few moments to notice the hard knock from the front of the house, followed by faint voices and the stomp of boots. A visitor, admitted by Will Cooper at the hour I defended most fiercely for my writing. I sighed, looked down at my quill, and stood. Thick clouds had been toying with the sun that morning, casting the interior of the house into peculiar shades that created illusions of presence in empty corners. It was for this reason that I thought at first I had imagined the man in the lower hall, as if a phantom of his form had flared up from Hell to burn through my very door.
He turned, looked everywhere but into my eyes, his smile tinged with everything that had passed between us.
“Father,” he said.
N
early three years had passed since that dreadful Trinity Sunday, a feast Sarah particularly loved. She would order up everything in threes for the supper. Three soups, three wines, three meats, three sweets, enlisting every taste in the celebration of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. The messenger arrived midmorning, as we were returning from early mass. Our house stood back from the priory walls on Overey Street by a good twenty feet, with two broad yew trees towering over a gated yard paved with riverstone. A young man waited within the courtyard. I recognized him as one of Chaucer’s clerks from the wool custom.
He bowed slightly. “I must speak with you, Master Gower,” he said, his eyes wandering toward Sarah. “I come direct from Master Chaucer, and at his orders.”
There was an awkward moment which Sarah smoothed over by going inside. No one else was about, save a few churchgoers gathered farther down. The shops were closed, the street appropriately silent for the morning of a feast day.
“Is Chaucer in some kind of trouble?” It would not have been the first time.
“Not—not Master Chaucer, sir. I’m here about your son, Master Simon.”
“Simon? What has Simon got to do with your business at the wool custom?”
“It might be best to leave such questions for Master Chaucer.”
I pressed the man as we walked to the Southwark wharf and boarded the waiting skiff.
“There’s been a killing, sir.”
My heart thrummed in my ears. “Simon?”
He shook his head. “Your son is safe.” He would say nothing more, and my worry turned to dread as we floated toward the Tower. I sat back on the board seat, willing the small boat across the river.
Chaucer was waiting at the quay. Above the water, as the skiff angled toward him, he stood still as a carved apostle, his face pale, his eyes swollen with exhaustion. When I stepped up he broke his stance and grasped my arm. We walked in silence to one of the warehouses down the wharf. At the door Chaucer stopped me. “Go easy on him, John.”
The air inside stank of sheep. Bales of wool were piled high to the rafters. A thin shaft of sunlight outlined a peculiar shape on the floor, reflecting upward to create a luminous sphere around Simon’s bowed head. He sat at the end of a long counting bench, nearly doubled at the waist. Low moans came from his chest, his body shaking with pain and fear. Against the near wall, just inside the door, rested the corpse: a form wrapped in sailcloth, a thatch of dark hair visible at one end, a trace of blood on the board floor.
Chaucer signaled to the watchman to leave us, then shut the door from within. I approached my son.
“What have you done?”
Simon was filthy, his clothes torn, his flesh reeking of ale. He looked up. His face was an utter mess. “I killed him, Father. And . . . there’s more.”
The moment stretched, my rising anger mingled with a helpless confusion. I turned to Chaucer. Back to Simon. Finally I approached the corpse and uncovered the face. I recognized it as belonging to a constable of Tower Street Ward, a man I had encountered once or twice, though I didn’t know his name.
Simon, in his stuttering way, and with Chaucer filling in the last several hours, revealed everything.
For some months, Simon told me, he had been involved in a counterfeiting ring, forging half nobles with the help of a goldsmith and an under-master at the King’s Mint. The smith would concoct a weak alloy, the under-master having sneaked one of King Edward’s obsolete stamps out of the Tower, and Simon would rough up the fake coins with bricks, trading them up for genuine nobles or down for groats and pennies. Too many of the three-shilling-fourpence coins appearing in London all at once would arouse suspicion, so Simon had arranged for quantities of them to be put into circulation at the markets in York, Hull, and Calais, as well as on deposit with two of the Italian banking houses on Lombard Street.
As he explained his logic and actions, I stared at his mouth, spewing these numbers and calculations as if he had been born a criminal. I had always hoped Simon’s prodigious talent with numbers and words would open doors to a respectable career, perhaps on the logic faculty at Oxford or in the law. Never would I have imagined my son conspiring with such men to forge a royal likeness on gold coins. Yet the scheme had been turning a handsome profit for some months, due in large part to Simon’s astute sense of the money supply.
Their luck turned when a constable of Tower Street Ward stumbled onto their operation while chasing down a petty thief, who had taken refuge in the back of the goldsmith’s shop. Rather than turning the three counterfeiters over to his superiors, the constable had attempted to extort part of their profits, threatening them with exposure should they refuse him. So, with the approval of his partners, Simon had arranged a large payoff, setting the exchange for just after curfew at a rough alehouse on the wharf. The negotiation had grown heated and was taken out to the bankside, where the men came to blows. Simon described the fight, his fists flying at the man’s face, taking his own hits, then delivering the final blow that sent the constable reeling backwards on the wharf, his head meeting an iron shipping-hook as he fell. Hearing the commotion, two watchmen at the wool wharf had come running, one of them tackling Simon to the ground, the other attempting to revive the fallen man.
Too late. Rather than summoning the authorities, they had sent for Chaucer, controller of the wool custom and something of a tyrant in his management of the wharf. At his direction the watchmen had hauled Simon inside along with the constable’s body, and there they had waited for Simon to recover from his drunkenness before questioning him about the incident.
“I made him tell me all of it before I sent for you,” Chaucer explained. “I thought it best to limit the surprises, make sure Simon had all of this straight so we could get to the truth without a lot of hemming and hawing.”
I nodded vacantly, the enormity of it all dawning on me. My only surviving child, a counterfeiter and a murderer.
Simon broke again, burying his face in his hands. “I’m sorry, Father, you—you have to appreciate my—”
“You’ll get no appreciation from me, Simon. Nor forgiveness.
Counterfeiting?
Did you think for one moment of your honor and my reputation?”
He looked up at me, his eyes lit with a righteous clarity that seemed drastically out of place. “You’re right, Father. Perhaps I should have pursued a more honorable trade. Are you taking apprentices?”
I hit him. Not a smack but a hard punch that sent him flying backwards to land on the filthy surface.
“
John!
” Chaucer rushed forward and reached for Simon, who was sprawled across the floor. Chaucer helped him to his feet, then stepped back, grasped my arm, and led me out to the wharf. He pushed me roughly against the side of the warehouse. “If Simon is taken—if there’s even an inquest—he’ll be hanged. Perhaps not for murder, my men will attest it was an accident, but for the coining. It’s treason to counterfeit the king’s mint.”
“Treason,” I said, the word bitter on my tongue.
“We can fix this,” Chaucer said in an angry whisper. He looked up the wharf. “The constable never told anyone else what he found out—otherwise he couldn’t have used the information against Simon. Do you see?”
I nodded tightly.
“As for my men, they’ll stay silent. They’re well paid, and God knows they keep enough secrets as it is. So really this all comes down to destroying evidence and staying mum.”
Chaucer’s focus on the practical had a calming effect. I looked at him. “So what do you suggest we do?”
There was no real choice in the end. The corpse was disposed of by the watchmen. A sack, four large stones, a skiff up to Stepney Marsh, the weighted body over the side and into the reeds. Simon, too, needed removal from London lest tongues start to wag. Chaucer would make all the necessary arrangements: passage to Tuscany; a letter of introduction to his old friend Sir John Hawkwood; a promise to check on Simon within a twelvemonth, as his business for the king would surely take him back to Italy before long.
With dire threats, I forbade Simon from speaking any word about the matter to Sarah. I would tell her of an unexpected opportunity for him in the south, an offer of employment in the king’s service, working on behalf of Hawkwood, the great mercenary and Richard’s newly appointed ambassador to Rome.
He left for Italy without bidding farewell to his mother. I thought it best that she remain ignorant. Within five days of the killing on the wool wharf, and with barely a whisper of notice in London, Simon’s presence in Southwark, and in our lives, was only a memory.
N
ow, with all this coming back to me in an unwanted rush, I watched Simon unbuckle his belt, remove his surcoat, line up his boots on the doorside block in the same way I had seen him do hundreds of times. The elegant movements of his hands, the distinctive lines of his face, the almond curves of his eyes, curls as neat as if an iron had pressed his hair: all still spoke of that insolent boy who could never please his father. Yet Simon’s gaze was not, as it had been the last time I saw him, floating toward Gravesend for a new life in Italy, defiant or proud. Instead it was tired or defeated. He wouldn’t meet my eyes.
“Why have you come back, Simon?”
Simon bowed his head. He was wearing a short gown, the sleeves long and wide in the Italian style. “I should have written ahead, Father, but with the roads, the French—I decided to come ahead on my own. I have taken a leave from Hawkwood’s service, with his consent, though I am not at all sure whether I shall go back to Italy. When Chaucer told me my mother had died I couldn’t help thinking of you, and of our home.” He looked around at the hall, though still would not show me his gaze. “I don’t imagine I shall be much comfort to you, but it seemed the right time to come back to England, after so long abroad. I should like to find a position in London, or if you don’t want me that close, I have contacts in Calais. I think my skills could be useful there.”
He continued on in this vein, and more than anything else it was his pathetic curiosity about Sarah’s death that began to stem my anger. When did she first show signs of sickness? Did she speak lucidly to you, Father, in her final hours? Did she have any last words for me? Because Chaucer never said. Was her suffering great? It was as if Simon, within his first hours back in Southwark, became the voice of my own, unspoken sorrow, now so mingled with his own.