'By Christ and his virgin mother, Will! Cut my throat and have done, if I must spend the rest of my life pissing in my robes from fear.'
William gave my shoulder a hard squeeze and released me. There was worry in his pox-eaten visage, and now that my fright had passed I was glad of his company.
*You are my bait, Patch -I wish to see this Moorish knifeman for myself,' he said, linking arms with me. We started off again, towards the bridge.
As I have said, Will was my closest friend. The rest were hangers-on; friends of convenience, useful to pass the time with (and in the case of Martin de Gallis, a courtier's bastard, useful for an occasional loan), but Will was the only one with any depth. In their beer-blurred and half-formed minds the others resented this bond a little, probably because they too were not particularly fond of each other, and made sport with us at times. They called us The Tups, in honour of our sheep-rearing origins, and would sometimes bleat at us by way of greeting, which we ignored. They were not, I confess, inherently wicked in any way, but more like children who stir the bottom of clear puddles merely to see the water muddy and spoiled. I have no doubt that each of them attained fat parishes and are lording it to this day, raising the skirts of their parishioners' ripe wives and guzzling down the fruits of other folk's honest labour. Go to, my friends, go to: I wish you joy.
Will, though, pursued his pleasures single-mindedly and without regard for the strictures of canon law. We were cut from very different cloth, he and I, he the knowing one, myself the innocent - although that is untrue. Will, in his way, was an innocent too, and threw himself into his drinking, whoring and fighting with the passion of a child, not of a fallen man. Perhaps that was why we were friends. For he never attempted to draw me into his wicked ways, and I, for my part, could not find it in my heart to scold him or even, truly, disapprove.
But nevertheless we were very different. And I had felt that difference keenly this very day. It was my habit to call on Will at his lodgings and find out from him what the evening's entertainment was likely to be - another telling indication of my own rather pious nature, that I was happier to go along with another's plans than admit to my own - and around sunset I had knocked on his door in the mean lodging house that stood rather too near the tanneries for comfort. He had bid me enter, and I strode in, to find him sitting on the edge of his pallet, arm around a girl.
I knew that Will made free with the city's whores -'courtesans,' he delighted in calling them - but it was a shock to find one of these creatures sitting in front of me, close enough for me to smell her, a warm waft of vetiver and sweat. She was young, no older than me, with the round, pink face of a country girl, a tangled mass of yellow hair piled on top of her head in a comically inept attempt to ape the courtly fashion of the day. She was plump, and her bosom was straining the threadbare linen of her tunic.
'This is Clarissa,' said Will. 'Clarissa, this fine personage is Petroc, my brother in Jesus.'
'Come in, Petroc,' said Clarissa, with a giggle that was almost coy. Her voice confirmed that she was indeed a local girl from some outlying village. I stepped into the room and closed the door hurriedly.
What ho, Will,' I stammered, trying but failing to sound like a man of the world.
What ho, yourself,' he replied. 'Are we away to the Crozier?'
'I hope,' said I.
"Well then,' he said to the girl, 'I will take my leave of you, dearest.'
You've kept me too long as it is,' she pouted, and pinched him lightly on the earlobe.
I saw then that Clarissa was arranging her clothes. So I had at least blundered in on the end of their business, not the beginning. She stood, plucked something from the top of Will's clothes-chest. I saw the flash of metal as she wound it into a fold of her skirt. Then she was standing before me, and regarding me pertly, her head cocked to one side. I found myself searching her face for the marks of sin, but all I saw was a pretty, tired country girl.
You're a big boy, brother Petroc,' she said, and pouted again. I realised that she was searching my face in turn. 'Do you need anything?'
'Nothing,' I blurted.
'Petroc really is good,' said Will from the pallet. 'But not in a bad way,' he added. 'Time to be off, Clarissa.' I caught a warning note in his voice.
But the girl stood before me, as if trying to decide some small but niggling problem. Then she gave a lopsided smile and hooked her thumbs into the top of her unlaced tunic. She jerked it down, and her breasts came spilling out. They were large and round, and very white. As a sea of mortification flooded over me, burning and freezing every inch of my body, I saw blue veins and brown nipples. She shook them slightly, and they juddered. Then I saw that there were flecks of white on the puckered teats. Clarissa was nursing. I tore my eyes away and glanced at Will. He sat there with a rather confused grin on his pitted face. I had never before seen him blush.
'Clarissa . . .' he said again.
The girl shrugged, and tucked herself back into her ridiculously small bodice. She put her forefinger against her thumb to make a little circle. It would not be the only time I saw that odd little gesture tonight.
'It don't cost nothing to look,' she whispered to me, and, reaching down, flicked me in the crotch with her finger. Then she was gone. I heard the door grind open and thud shut again.
It hurt between my legs where she had flicked me. Her aim had been true - my pitifully weak flesh had risen proudly to meet her. I gazed dumbly around the room. Something had changed, although what it was I could not tell. Then I understood. It was I who had changed. Something had been broken or damaged. I was like a new knife that, used carelessly for the first time, picks up a nick or a tiny twist to the blade and never fits so smoothly into its sheath again.
'Oh no,' I breathed.
'They weren't that bad,' said Will, who had stepped to my side. Anyway, you didn't touch anything, so you should be safe. Soul-wise,' he added. He grabbed me round the shoulders and shook me. 'Come on, boy. Don't tell me that's the first pair of bubbies you've clapped eyes on.'
But it was - save nursing women glimpsed and hurriedly turned away from in the streets. Clarissa, too, was a mother, and yet Will ... I shook my head to clear it. How easy damnation crept upon one. How simple, and how sweet. Oh, Christ. I thumped myself in the groin, and my flesh howled in protest.
'Easy, brother,' said Will. You need that for pissing.'
Then he was pulling me from the room and out into the dreary Balecester dusk, and we made our way to the Crozier, and I found Clarissa's breasts all too easy, after a brace of beers, to forgive, if not quite to forget.
Now Will was worrying about me yet again. 'Those oafs care for nothing but drink and women, and as they cannot lay their nasty mitts on the one, they must perforce concentrate on the other,' he was saying. 'And they are as greedy as swine: no sooner were you gone than Owen and Alfred rushed to look for the gold, but the passage was empty. Now they have returned to their slothful chatter, and I for one am tired of it. Besides, this is evidently a dangerous night to be walking about alone.'
What kind of a man plays games with knives and gold, Will?' I said. 'Who do you suppose he is?'
'If he is the man I have seen near the palace, I would say that he is a knight returned from the Holy Land. He has been under a hot sun, and he has a fighter's look. Besides, his clothes are foreign.' I remembered the man's green cloak: it had looked like rich, patterned silk.
'He was French, I think,' I said.
'Or Norman,' said Will. 'The French are small - this fellow is tall, and his lip curls like a Norman.' He spat.
Will had no love for the Normans. His father's grandfather, or the grandfather's grandfather, was a thegne who had died in King Harold's shield-wall at Hastings. The family lost their lands and had become wool-merchants instead, growing quite rich again and building a fine house in Morpeth, a town in the far north which my friend described as 'a whorehouse for Scots and drovers, but lacking the whores'. Will, the bright third son, had been packed off to Balecester 'to become a bishop', Will would say ruefully. 'A burgher's fat soul needs a bishop in the family if it is to squeeze into heaven. My father is about as pious as his sheep. But the Lord is a shepherd, and Pater trades in wool, so the old monster feels a certain kinship with his Redeemer' - and here he would wink at me - 'but he knows you can fleece men as well as lambkins: he longs to see me with crozier in one hand, shears in the other, and my holy bum on a golden woolsack.'
As we turned up Ox Lane, the street where I made my lodgings, the curfew bell sounded in the distance, and as always I strained to hear the scurrying of feet which I always imagined must follow. In my experience, bells were rung for a purpose: to summon, to warn and to drive away storms. Here in the town, no one took much notice, until the Sheriff s men came at them with their knobbled staves. We students were meant to fight these dullards, it was expected of us, and Will boasted a long scar that divided his tonsure almost from ear to ear. Sophisticate that I was, I felt inclined to be at home and abed whilst these rumpuses took place. And now, as my landlady's door came into view, I turned and caught that twinkle in my companion's eye that meant his night was not yet over.
We reached the threshold of my lodgings. Will tapped me on the chest with a loose fist. He was grinning like a hungry fox.
'Bar your door tonight, brother, in case your crusader comes a-knocking.'
'My crusader, Will? You are more than welcome to him yourself I replied. I was tired now, although it was not late, and sleep seemed the most desirable thing in the world.
'Keep safe, brother,' I said. 'Don't go picking up stray coins.'
'My eyes will be on the heavens, Patch, as always.'
And he turned and loped away into the moon-shadows. I climbed the narrow, creaking stairs to my lodgings under the roof. The latch stuck, as always, and then the usual smell of mildewed thatch greeted me. I lit a candle stub and let the warm tallow reek fight off the roofs stale breath - I had decided, soon after taking up residence, that the thatch was so damp that I was unlikely to set it on fire. My pallet, too, was damp and I shivered for a while, my sheepskin mantle tight around me. The candlelight flickered yellow along the rafters and over the bilious straw. Sleep was near, and the bedbugs were hungry. I could hear their little guts rumble as I snuffed out the flame.
Chapter Three
T
he next morning brought rain. It woke me in the near-dawn before matins, filtering through the decay of the thatch, drip-dripping onto the end of my nose and down into my open mouth. I carried the taste with me as I sloshed through the puddles, my robes hitched up like an alewife, and as I dozed through the morning service. Only when my head drooped and my jaw hit the pew in front with a hollow clunk did the savour of blood drive it away. I had bitten my tongue, but I was awake.
The rest of the morning passed in an unpleasant haze. My head throbbed slightly from the evening's beer, and my tongue throbbed where my teeth had pinched it. I had volunteered -always the eager one - to copy out a lengthy gloss of Origen for one of the masters, and the effort of keeping the quill steady left me exhausted by lunchtime. I found Will in the refectory. He looked sour and twisted, like a hawk with an excess of bile, and like a hawk he croaked and baited when I enquired about his nocturnal activities. He cheered somewhat when I insisted he drink my share of the small-beer provided. In the afternoon I would have to endure a lecture on Roman law, and I needed to keep a clear head. Any unfortunate who dropped off while Magister Jens Tribonensis lectured would be woken by the fat German's stave across his shoulders, and a verbal flaying thereafter. Master Jens might look like a jovial, red-faced buffoon, but he took his Cicero very seriously indeed.
Will squinted at me through red eyes. 'Sweet dreams, brother Patch?' he enquired.
'The pure of heart never dream, as you well know.' I lied. A dream of sorts had returned again and again. Cornish Owen pelted me with gold coins in a stinking tavern room, and I knew that, in a chamber above us, a man in a green cloak admired his knife. I heard my name, a whisper that slid down the staircase in the corner of the room. As I scrabbled at the door, which of course would not open, Owen burbled a mindlessly filthy ditty behind me.
'You, on the other hand, have not put the purity of your own heart to the test lately, Will. Your eyes look as if they need peeling.'
'Strange, my dearest brother, for they were peeled all last night, looking for your dagger-man.'
'I earnestly want to forget that bastard.'
"Well, of course. But as I said, I'm sure I have seen him before. So I sniffed around the palace—'
Before I knew it I had grabbed Will's sleeve.
'Please, brother. Let us forget last night.'
We both looked down. My knuckles stood out white against the dark cloth.
'Softly, Patch,' my friend said. 'I'm sorry. I just wanted to warn you. Your friend — your acquaintance — is the Bishop's Steward. Or at least I am fairly sure he is.'
"What is a madman like that doing in the Bishop's service?' I asked, curious despite everything.
'I don't know. Making enough money to throw about the place, for one thing.' Will patted my hand soothingly. 'Don't worry, Patch. I'm sure he's forgotten all about you. On the other hand, according to my sources, he is a really unpleasant creature. Likes tying up girls and tickling them with his knife.'
'Oh yes? So your enquiries involved looking up skirts as well as around comers.' I was feeling a little better.
Will ignored me. 'He isn't a Norman: he's Breton. He has not long arrived from the Holy Land, it seems, and the Bishop keeps him as a strong-man of some kind. From what I gathered, his duties are of an—' He paused, and cleared his throat.'—An executive nature.' What do you mean?'