Tasters 19

This is the story of a great poet. The same poet cheated shop-

keepers, stole money from the university, mixed with prostitutes, broke into churches. He also killed a priest, was thrashed in the streets by the public executioner, was jailed in Orléons, again in the Loire then twice more in Paris, was tortured, and at least once, perhaps three times, was condemned to be hanged.

[...]

'Je ris en pleurs et attens sans espoir', PD,2 (L,7), 'I laugh through tears and wait without hope', 'Je cognois tout, for que moy mesmes', PD,6 (L,3), 'I know everything except myself'. Many of his verses are remarkable descriptions of the decent delights and indecent depravities of the Paris that he knew so well: bishops and brothels; priests and prisons; clerics and criminals; Te Deums and taverns; ladies of the nobility and ladies of the street. This empathy with everyday life and his awareness of its brevity enabled him to write poetry so ingeniously crafted that it seems to speak without art, person to person, to his readers.

'No man is my master save the King,' the woodman answered. 'Who is there, save a false traitor, who would refuse to serve the English king?'

'I know not about the English King,' said the man Jenkin. 'What sort of English king is it who cannot lay his tongue to a word of English? You mind last year when he came down to Malwood, with his inner marshal and his outer marshal, his justiciar, his seneschal, and his four and twenty guardsmen. One noontide I was by Franklin Swinton's gate, when up he rides with a yeoman pricker at his heels. "Ouvre," he cried, "ouvre," or some such word, making signs for me to open the gate; and then "Merci," as though he were afraid of me. And you talk of an English king?'

'I do not marvel at it,' cried the Cambridge scholar, speaking in the high drawling voice which was common among his class. 'It is not a tongue for men of sweet birth and delicate upbringing. It is a foul, snorting, snarling manner of speech. For myself, I swear by the learned Polycarp that I have most ease with Hebrew, and after that perchance with Arabian.'

'I will not hear a word said against old King Ned,' cried Hordle John in a voice like a bull. 'What if he is fond of a bright eye and a saucy face? I know one of his subjects who could match him at that. If he cannot speak like an Englishman I trow that he can fight like an Englishman, and he was hammering at the gates of Paris while alehouse topers were grutching and grumbling at home.'

This loud speech from a man of so formidable appearance, somewhat daunted the disloyal party, and they fell into a sullen silence, which enabled Alleyne to hear something of the talk which was going on in the further corner between the tooth-drawer, the physician and the gleeman.

'A raw rat,' the man of drugs was saying, 'that is what it is ever my use to order for the plague - a raw rat with its paunch cut open.'

'Might it not be broiled, most learned sir?' asked the tooth-drawer. 'A raw rat sounds a most sorry and cheerless dish.'

'Not to be eaten,' cried the physician, in high disdain. 'Why should any man eat such a thing?'

'Why indeed?' asked the gleeman, taking a long draw at his tankard.

'It is to be placed on the sore or swelling. For the rat, mark you, being a foul-living creature, hath a natural drawing or affinity for all foul things, so that the noxious humours pass from the man into the unclean beast.'

'Would that cure the Black Death, master?' asked Jenkin.

'Aye, truly would it, my fair son.'

I had spent my youth travelling with a band of goliards, given to them at a young age when my mother died, the mistress of a cleric who could no longer hide my presence. They raised me as one of their own, taught me Latin, grammar, logic, but most of all, how to perform. We travelled thye large cathedral towns, Tous, Cluny, Le Puy, reciting our irreverent songs, tumbling and juggling for the crowds. Each summer, we passed through Veille du Père. I saw Sophie there at her father's inn, her shy blue eyes unable to hide from mine. And later, I noticed her peeking at a rehearsal - I was sure, at me.

I swiped a sunflower and went up to her. 'What goes in all stiff and stout, but when it comes out it's flopping about?'

She widened her eyes and blushed. 'How could anyone but a devil have such bright red hair?' Then she ran away. 'A cabbage,' I was about to say.

Each year when we returned, I came bearing a sunflower, until Sophie had grown from a gangly girl to the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. [...] I called her my princess, and she said that I probably had one in every town. But in truth, I did not. Each year I promised I would come back, and I always did. One year, I stayed.

The three years we'd been married had been the happiest I had known. I felt secure for the first time in my life. And deeply in love.

But as I held Sophie that night, something told me I could no longer live like this. The rage that burned in my heart from that day's horror was killing me. There would always be another Norcross, another ax or allotmet levied upon us. Or another Alo ... One day, the boy strung up on that wheel could be our own.

Until we were free.