He was on the curve of the stairs beyond sight of anyone at their head or foot when he met Mariena coming up. In the stone-walled narrowness he stepped as much aside as he could, flattening his back to the wall to let her pass. Though she had to turn sideways, too, there was room for her to pass without touching him but she did - and more than touched. She brushed her body, her breasts, and hips across his, for a moment paused with her fine-boned, beautiful face upturned to his, her lips slightly parted, inviting a kiss he might have given except that he was so startled he only stared at her in the instant before her gaze fell and she went on, with the slightest of smiles at the corner of her mouth and a sidelong look back at him from under her lowered lids before the curve of the stairs took her from sight.
Swallowing thickly, shaken by how easily she had raised him, he went uncomfortably downward, only to meet Sia on the last curve of the stairs. He would rather not have dealt with her just then and would have gone past when she stepped aside, out of his way, but she put out her arm, barring him from going down, and said, 'She was waiting for you, you know.'
'And so were you,' Joliffe said lightly; and because Sia was almost as near to him as Mariena had been and her face was turned up to him the same way, he kissed her. The kiss turned into more than he had meant it to be, with Sia's arms coming around his waist and her body leaning into his, pressing him back against the wall.
He was the first to break it off, but Sia, still leaning against him, smiled up into his face with a sigh of satisfaction. 'There now,' she said. 'That's better.'
Before [Diot] could decide whether her fear of this "special" house was greater than her fear of angering a man powerful enough to cow the whoremaster, he was back with a most beautiful, elegantly dressed woman.
'Good God, what is this?' Magdalene asked, stopping short when she saw Diot.
'Never mind the dirt,' Bell said hastily. 'It will wash away. More important, listen to her speak. I do not know what has befallen her, but if she did not begin in a gentleman's Household, I will kiss her as she is.'
'Others have not found it so great a sacrifice,' Diot snapped.
Magdalene's lips had parted to make a sharp comment to Bell, but she turned her eyes to the woman. The filthy rags and the bruises that could be seen through them had given the impression of an utterly broken creature, but the tart retort to a dominant male and the faultless accent in the Norman tongue started a new train of ideas.
'You were beaten and cast out of your last place,' Magdalene said. 'For what?'
'Doubtless for refusing to obey orders,' Bell put in, when Diot hesitated. 'I saved her another beating, or maybe worse, for refusing to servise the whoremaster and doing some damage to his private parts.'
'It was a whoremistress did this to me,' Diot said. 'I had hoped she would be more understanding, but when I refused to eat a man's dung, she had me beaten, took my clothing and my few farthings, and cast me out like this.'
Magdalene sighed. There was, of course, no way to guess whether the woman's statement was true. It was certainly not impossible. And she had now seen through the dirt what Bell's male eyes had more quickly discerned that the woman was beautiful.
[...]
'It was that house on Dockside opposite Botolph's Warf,' Bell said.
Magdalene shrugged. 'Well, you would not want to go back there in any case.'
'Looking like this, only that kind of place will take me,' Diot remarked bitterly.
'Yes, that is true. Which is why I will offer you a bath and a decent gown.'
'How much?' Diot asked, her eyes suddenly brighter with eagerness.
'For caritas. I am a woman and a whore also.'
(From the Introduction:) When Leonardo da Vinci moved from Milan in 1499, the inventory of his books included a number on natural history, the sphere, the heavens - indicators of some of the prime interests of that unparalleled mind. But out of the multitude of travel accounts that Leonardo could have had, in MS or from the new printing press, there is only the one: Mandeville's "Travels". At about the same time (so his biographer, Andres Bernaldez, tells us) Columbus was perusing Mandeville for information on China preparatory to his voyage; and in 1576, a copy of the "Travels" was with Frobisher as he lay off Baffin Bay. The huge number of people who relied on the "Travels" for hard, practical geographical information in the two centuries after the book first appeared demands that we give it serious attention if we want to understand the mental picture of the world of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance
