Part 28 (1/2)

The amba.s.sador wrote his poems not on wax but in little books, parchment quires folded within a worn cover of faded leather. Each time he filled one of these booklets with his notes and drafts he would remove it from its cover and place a new quire within. He wrote constantly, rejecting nine out of ten of his own crafted lines. She marvelled at how one man could waste so many words.

Her own stories she spun from the tales of the Moors remembered from her mother. She was his Sherazade, filling her accounts with flying horses and evil viziers, moaning ghouls and poisoned fountains. The only tale she never told him was the story of her life.

One of their favourite entertainments was trading in riddles. Enigmas, he called them, word puzzles in which simple truths are disguised and things are never what they seem. He would slip them to her on torn lengths of waste paper, and she would have to guess their solution before his next appearance.

Some were trivial, riddles about roofless houses and eggs, or chairs and silent goats.

Others were obscene, written to raise a blush on her fair skin.

I am a long rod swinging by a man's leg. He likes to shove me into familiar holes. Who am I? No, not that. A key.

Between two curved legs I quiver, a twist of eager flesh, singing sweetly when fingered. Who am I? No, not that. A harpstring.

The one that most provoked her was an enigma of the moon. He slipped it to her on the second Sunday in Advent, during a procession outside San Lorenzo.

Whisper the middle of a moon, Think the wheel of a wagon, Trace the beginning of a king, And mine own shall be yours.

For a full week she puzzled over its meaning, parsing each syllable, looking for that hidden kernel. And on the eighth night, as she slept, a wagon wheel spinning in her dreams- -she awoke, and she had it. A wheel? The letter O. The 'beginning of a king'? 'King' is 'rex' in Latin. The letter R. And the 'middle of a moon'? A half-moon, of course. The letter C.

'Cor.' Latin for 'heart'. And mine yours, she silently promised him as she drifted back to sleep, and my flesh as well.

Stories, riddles, sin: her father and stepmother were hardly pleased. Florence was starting to whisper, and consorting with this Englishman would only sully her reputation. Il Critto is the son of a landed gentryman, her stepmother scolded her, an upper esquire. This man you favour is merely an esquire en service, with no lands or rents to his name and married!

Il Critto, too, took notice of her growing attachment to the older man, coming around less frequently and casting dark looks on the two of them from afar. She ignored them all.

Though she recognized the older man's poetical genius (as, indeed, what living man or woman could not? you are surely thinking), some of his making struck her as facile and unserious. She coyly told him so, infuriating and delighting him at once. He told her of his plan for a greater work, a collection of tales in the manner of Boccaccio.

'Though this work, unlike the Decameron, shall be framed not with pestilence but with pilgrimage,' he said. 'The pilgrims shall all tell their own tales as they travel from city to town. Two stories each on the journey out, two on the way home. The narrator will be a pilgrim as well, his feeble talents serving to convince us that the whole compilation bears the ring of truth.'

She taunted him: 'Your readers must be gullible indeed, to fall for such poetical tricks.'

He waved a hand. 'In this land poets are considered akin to prophets. Look at Florence's own Dante, writing of a journey to h.e.l.l and back, telling us plainly it is all a lie even as he inks his tercets at his desk. And yet the people credit him as a true visitor to the underworld! Readers will believe anything they are told to believe.'

She looked at him, a provocation in her gaze. 'And you would be the new Dante? Spouting visions and prophecies with the ease of a sibyl?'

'Prophecy is a game like any other, no more complex than our exchanges of riddles and enigmas,' he said. 'Show me a lunatic with a quill and I will show you a prophet.'

'Prove it,' she said.

'I shall rise to your impertinent challenge,' he vowed, and began a work that promised to redeem his talents in her eyes, and win her to his bed. 'It shall be a book of kings,' he told her. 'A book of kings, and their deaths. Once I have completed it, you must quite me with a work of your own. For then it will be your turn to write for the gullible.'

Less than a week had pa.s.sed when, on a bright winter morning, the amba.s.sador appeared at her door.

'The work is done,' he told her, pleased with himself. He pulled out his current booklet, which he had filled to the last folio with a rough copy of his creation. 'Take me within, muse, and I shall read it to you.'

Just then his young rival appeared at the end of the street. Il Critto's eyes darkened as he strode forward, his jaw a hard knot of envy. But her love put a kindly arm around the younger man's shoulders and drew him into her father's house, as if nothing was amiss. The three of them went up to the gallery, and it was there that she heard the prophecies.

As her lover recited his tuneful lines, she listened with a thrilled amus.e.m.e.nt to these beguiling prognostications of royal deaths. How he laughed over his own audacity! The work was an amus.e.m.e.nt to him, its mortal prophecies cast in the gentle light of his wit.

He had even thought to include an actual game in his prophecies: the thistleflowers, hawks, swords, and plums painted on the oval playing cards he often brought with him to her father's house. Yet to anyone else hearing the work, these prophecies would appear genuine, the true products of some latter-day Jeremiah foretelling the deaths of twelve kings, from poor King William to the late King Edward.

Il Critto laughed with them, his boyish grin easing their concerns that- Ah, but I must drop the pretence of story, my heart. As I think back on that fateful morning, all I see now are Il Critto's owl eyes gazing over my shoulder at the cloth, those mole's ears resounding with your baleful verse. The eyes and ears of Simon Gower, a serpent coiled in envy and plotting his revenge.

FORTY-TWO.

Gropec.u.n.t Lane Years ago, soon after the deaths of my elder children, I once followed the Bishop of Ely up Soper Lane, watched him hand a few coins to a maudlyn, and waited as he disappeared into a stall. I confronted him that same afternoon with the evidence of his sin: a copy of the wh.o.r.e's confession, purchased from a clerk at Guildhall after her arranged arrest. For a pound it can all be forgotten, I said. The archbishop won't have to know.

I'll never forget the look he gave me, half scornful, half amused as he leaned against a column in the west end of St Paul's. Know what, Gower? That I just swyved his favourite wh.o.r.e?

What I learned that day was that episcopal visitations with wh.o.r.es were not only not off-limits but commonplace. Unusable. I never again bothered with maudlyns.

So despite my easy familiarity with the underside of London, I felt a bit awkward as I stood at the foot of Gropec.u.n.t Lane that afternoon, wondering how it all worked. I did not have to speculate for long. Fewer than five steps into the lane I was confronted by an aggressive young woman who stepped from the shadows of a horsestall. 'Fancy a bit, good sir?' Her hair, unhooded and wild, swept from her brow in a tempestuous wave. Her eye sockets had been blackened with coal or pitch: a Gorgon, her cheeks painted in a red shade rubbed into pink circles. I shook my head tightly and walked on.

Several more maudlyns accosted me on my way up the lane, chirping of their smooth skin, their fair b.r.e.a.s.t.s, their shapely b.u.t.tocks, ripe for you, sir, ripe for you. Near the end of the lane one final woman stepped forward. Her hair had a reddish sheen and she was small, delicate. She put her arms around me, pus.h.i.+ng her lithe form against mine. 'I've a young body for your use, good sir,' she said. 'Youngest you'll find on this stretch, sure.'

I gently removed myself. 'Fourpence to talk.'

'Talk?' She pulled away. 'Want to talk to me that way, do you? Price be the same, though.'

'Not that kind of talk. I need to ask some questions.'

'Like them constables?'

'I'm not an arm of the law. Not even a finger.'

She squinted up at me, scrutinizing my intentions. 'You'll want me bawd,' she said softly, putting a hand on my chest, and I felt in the lingering pressure a gentle warning as she hurried down toward St Pancras. She returned with a large, triple-chinned woman wearing a dun dress of shapeless wool and a hat covered in embroidered flowers, all faded with the years.

'This be Joan Rugg, sir.'

I nodded my thanks, then half-bowed to the bawd. 'Mistress Rugg.'

She beamed. 'Your first time on Gropec.u.n.t Lane?'

'It is,' I admitted, strangely abashed, as if I should have been expected to possess more experience of whoring.

'Well,' she huffed. 'We're a mite careful up this way with strangers.'

'I understand.'

'Your purpose?'

'I seek a young woman.'

'Queynt?'