Pilgrimage of Death Read online

  PILGRIMAGE OF DEATH

  SALLY SPENCER

  © Sally Spencer 2015

  Sally Spencer has asserted her rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 2015 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  This edition published in 2018 by Endeavour Media Ltd

  Table of Contents

  PROLOGUE

  Day the First

  Day the Second

  Day the Second

  Day the Second

  Day the Third

  Day the Third

  Day the Third

  Day the Fourth

  Day the Third

  Day the Fourth

  Day the Fourth

  Day the Fifth

  Day the Fifth

  Day the Fifth

  Day the Fifth

  EPILOGUE

  PROLOGUE

  I am an old man now. I have seen my own wife die. I have stood by open graves on misty mornings and watched both my friends and my enemies being lowered into them. And soon my time will come too, for though the Good Lord has spared me thus far, even a benevolent god cannot allow a man to live forever. So now, as my sixtieth birthday approaches - and my tombstone looms so high on the horizon that it already shuts out much of my light - I find myself picking up my quill for one last time.

  It is not that I wish to write, you understand. It is that I must. For I cannot depart this earth without making some attempt to atone for an act of artistic cowardice which has preyed on my conscience for almost two decades.

  My muse, that critical spirit which lives - often uncomfortably for both of us - in my imagination, warned me of the dangers of evasion long ago, but I would not listen.

  ‘My Book of Tales of Canterbury will be a brave work – an important work,’ I told her. ‘Men will still read it hundreds of years hence.’

  ‘True,’ my muse agreed.

  ‘Yet you want me to abandon it!’ I said angrily.

  ‘Not abandon it – merely put it to one side.’

  ‘And for what? In order to write of murder! God’s nails, men have been chronicling murders since the dawn of the written word. Such pieces are as stale as last week’s bread.’

  ‘I do not deny that there have been many accounts of murders…’ my muse agreed, in her silky, persuasive voice.

  ‘Well, then…?’

  ‘ … but never such an account as you could write now.’

  ‘I do not see…’

  ‘Show me another work where the murder is described, but in which the identity of the murderer is kept an absolute secret until the breathless end. Quote me one other example of a who-hath-done-it.’

  ‘I…’

  ‘You cannot! Believe one who has guided you for so long - there has never been, in all the history of literature, a work like the Pilgrimage of Death.’

  You understand now what I was forced to deal with in her! She already had a name for the work - this treacherous muse of mine - and for one brief moment I almost gave way to her wishes. Almost – but not quite.

  The task I already had in hand was adventure enough for me, I told myself. For though my Tales would float atop the raft of writings which had preceded them, they would still be a bold new work.

  Was that not a large enough step for any one man to take?

  What need had I to go even further, and invent a new kind of craft entirely?

  Because that was what it would have taken to describe the incident in Dartford – a craft totally unlike any other that had ever sailed across the pages of literature.

  And so I exiled my muse – thanked her for the foundations she had laid for me, and sent her on her way.

  Or so I thought.

  But now, as my final days approach, she has returned to rebuke me – to chide me for that which I have left undone. She knows, you see – as I have always known too, deep within myself - that I cannot go to my grave without at least attempting to construct this new kind of craft.

  Day the First

  1386 had been a year in which my fortunes – and those of England itself – had been on the wane.

  In my youth I had fought for King Edward III in France, where we English achieved such magnificent victories that, for a brief moment at least, it had seemed possible the French would give in to Edward’s demands and offer him their crown. But now Edward was gone, and so were our days of glory. The French, it was widely believed, were preparing to invade us - to continue to fight the old festering war, except that now, for the first time, it would be fought on English soil. And the court - riven by a power struggle between King Richard and his favourites on one side, and the Duke of Gloucester (the king’s uncle) and his supporters on the other – seemed incapable of summoning up the will to counter the foreign threat.

  I myself had no part to play in any of these struggles, for I had been cast out of any circle in which I could have some influence.

  Yet it had not always been so.

  Once, I had been a favourite of King Edward’s. When I was captured by the French, he had paid a part of my ransom out of his own pocket. And were that not enough to prove his love for me, he had granted me an annuity of twenty marks and had called me his ‘beloved valet’.

  Once, too, I had a friend and supporter in John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, who, like the Duke of Gloucester, was the seed of mighty Edward’s loins.

  What a power Gaunt had once been in England! While Richard was no more than a boy, he had been the virtual ruler of the country. Yet now he had relinquished that position. In his desire to acquire a throne on which he could sit as undisputed ruler, he had turned his back on England and set off for Iberia, where he intended to shore up his dubious legal claim to the kingdom of Castille with the solid argument of English steel.

  Thus it was that, with one patron dead and another abroad, I found myself - for the first time in my adult life - a nobody. And worse than that, I was a poor nobody. I had been stripped of my position as Controller of Customs in London, the sinecure being handed to a man more in favour with the royal court than I, and my prospects looked bleak.

  And so I did what many men in my position have done in the past. I told myself, without perhaps total conviction, that I should see my new situation not as a defeat, but as an opportunity – that during my period of enforced idleness I could at last begin work on my literary masterpiece. And it was in that frame of mind that, as dusk was drawing a curtain over what had been a fresh spring day, I entered the common room of the Tabard Inn.

  *

  The Tabard was – and still is – located just beyond the southern end of London Bridge in the town of Southwark. Not, I hasten to add for the benefit those who do not know the place themselves, that Southwark can truly called a town in its own right, for it is little more than a carbuncle growing on the fleshy arse of the big city across the river.

  The inn itself was unremarkable. On the ground floor, just beyond the gate, was the common room. It was a barn of a place, as inn common rooms are apt to be, yet so tightly crammed with roughly hewn wooden tables and benches that I pitied the servants whose job it was to change the straw on the floor.

  The large fireplace in the corner of the room smoked abominably, and while the table next to it may have been a sought-after spot during the long harsh winter, it would now, in the spring, appeal only to a fisherman who wished to smoke his catch without leaving his drink.

  Beyond the common room was the yard, passable enough in the dry weather, but a morass once it had rained. The stables ran around three sides of this yard, for the beast needs to rest as much as his master. Above these stables and the common room were the bedchambers, which were entered by climbing an outside staircase
and walking along a gallery.

  If I have laboured somewhat over my description of the Tabard – if those of you who know such places well have found it tiresome – then I apologise, but in my own defence I must point out that I am also writing for those who may have been born long after such inns have ceased to exist. Besides – and perhaps more to the point – such descriptions form part of an old writer’s trick, which, since I mean to have no secrets from my readers in this book, I will now explain to you.

  Literature, you must understand, is based on contrasts. On one level it contrasts the reader’s experience with those he reads about in the book. But there is a further, more complex level which exists within the world of the book itself, and which, by contrasting different elements of the work, seeks to show how incongruously they stand in relation to one another. And that is precisely the element I am using here. By describing the commonplace nature of the inn, I hope to make my reader aware of just how uncommon were the group who had gathered in it that night. For indeed, they were a motley crew, drawn together only by a common desire to visit the shrine of the blessed martyr of Canterbury.

  A franklin sat at one table, a fine silk purse hanging from his girdle. And at the next table, close enough to rub shoulders with him, was a ploughman, dressed in a simple smock and - though he was far from his fields - still smelling of dung. A merchant sat, elbow to elbow, with another man who had a nautical air about him. There were young and old, rich and poor, male and female. And, as will become clear later, there were those whose souls were of the purest white and those with souls as dark as the blackest night.

  As I stood in the doorway marvelling at the scene, a serving wench approached me. Her practised eye took in my gown, her quick mind assessed my status, and without more ado she led me over to a table far from the kippering fire, at which, she had no doubt calculated, I would be most at my ease.

  It was at this table that I first met some of the characters who will feature in my little drama - in my who-hath-done-it.

  A knight, there was, dressed in a plain fustian tunic which was stained with the marks left by his armour. And with him his squire, a lad of some twenty summers, who was his son.

  ‘I bid you welcome, sir,’ this knight said to me. ‘Will you break bread with us?’

  And I said that I would.

  ‘A perfect gentle-knight’ I called him in my Tales, but this work is a horse of a different colour, in which the core of my story is bloody murder, so here, perhaps, I should give a less idealised picture of the man.

  I described the knight in the Tales as chivalrous, and so he was – but let us not take one side of a man and pretend that we have the whole picture.

  The Black Prince, the eldest son of my sovereign lord, Edward III, was noted for his chivalry, too. I fought with him in France, and saw it for myself.

  How courteously the prince would treat the captured French. He would talk to them – if they were of high enough estate – as though they were his guests rather than his prisoners. He would even wait on them like the humblest of their servants. Oh, the prince was the very model of chivalry – but he never set the Frenchies free until he had made sure that their ransom had been paid.

  And so it was, I believe, with this knight – Sir Hugo. He had fought the infidels for the love of Christ, but he had also fought them for Pierre de Lusignan, King of Cyprus and for the Bey of Balat - two men far too worldly wise to ever imagine that such expert assistance would come without considerable expense on their part.

  And did the knight – this warrior of the Lord – accept the money that these foreign potentates would have offered him? Well, a man does not obtain such fine horses as this Sir Hugo had in his stable by paying for them with blackberries.

  His son, the squire, was quite another matter. He did not have his father’s height, nor ever would have, and like many short men I have known, he sought to compensate for his lack of stature by an excess of virility. Even as he took my hand in greeting, his eyes were straying towards the plump serving wench who had brought me to the table, and I trow that beneath the board his codpiece and his manhood were engaged in a mighty struggle.

  ‘Short was his gowne, with sleves longe and wyde,’ I say of him in my Tales. Need I say more now?

  There were others sitting beside us – the franklin I had noted earlier, a monk with a shining pate, a prioress who simpered, a merchant with a forked beard to match the organ which rested inside his mouth …

  But this is not the prologue to my Tales, and more may be said of the other pilgrims later, as we draw closer to the spilling of the blood.

  We, on our board, were provided with a goodly meal (though other guests like the poor ploughman, I noted, made do with bread and cheese). We began with broth, light meats, lettuce and cabbage, all excellently spiced, and followed that with pies of meat and pork. And as we ate – and drank – so the noise within the room became louder and louder. For with quantities of good wine and good food inside of them, is it not only natural that men should tell jokes which make others look the lesser and boast of their own achievements in a manner designed to exalt them above their natural eminence?

  It was towards the end of our meal that we were disturbed by the sound of a metal ladle banging against a metal pan. Looking up, we saw that the man who had brought these two instruments together was standing in the centre of the common room.

  He was a portly fellow, with ham-like hands which made both the pan and the ladle seem mere toys. On his broad face there was a wide, but slightly nervous, smile.

  ‘Welcome, good gentlefolk!’ he said in a booming landlord’s voice. ‘Welcome indeed to my humble inn. I hope that my cook’s striving has not been in vain and you have supped well.’

  We all agreed we had, (and probably still would have done, out of politeness, had it not been true).

  Our host nodded his head with all the satisfaction of one has heard exactly what he had expected to hear.

  ‘Many pilgrims who pass through Southwark on their way to Canterbury choose to stay the night at the Tabard,’ he continued. ‘So you must treat the next words I speak with respect, for they are not the vain chattering of a fool, but the thoughts of a man with much experience in such matters.’

  I felt my back stiffen. The host, I had decided, was about to commence on a course designed to sell me something which I did not want but he was most desirous to have me take. I glanced across at the knight to see if similar thoughts were crossing his mind, but read no evidence in his face that he was aware of what was to come next. It was then, I think, that I realised that while he might have the heart of a lion, he had the brain of an altogether much smaller creature.

  ‘Yes, many pilgrims have passed through this humble inn of mine,’ the host said. ‘I talk to all of them as I have been talking to you, for is it not my duty to be jovial to my guests? But – and this I tell you in all honesty – once they have left my inn, I would not give most of them the time of day.’

  Oh, beware the man who assures you that now he is talking honestly, I thought.

  ‘Yes, some of the pilgrims that I have seen have been the most miserable and woe-begotten specimens that woman ever gave birth to,’ the host continued. ‘Why, from the way they carried themselves you’d have sworn they had the plague – or at least a dose of the pox.’ He paused for a moment, and inclined his head towards the prioress. ‘My apologies for using such blunt speech in your presence, good Madam,’ he continued. ‘But living, as I do, in a world where such language is common currency, it is sometimes hard not to spend a little of it myself.’

  The prioress favoured him with the slightest and gravest of nods, which was meant, I believe, to indicate that she’d forgiven him his slip. Yet I could have sworn that she was finding it hard not to smile.

  ‘But you are not like those pilgrims I have just spoken of,’ the host said, addressing the room in general. ‘No, good friends, you are a completely different kettle of fish to the usual mournful mummers who make
their way to Blessed Thomas’ shrine. You have some life about you, and I’ll wager you’d welcome a little fun to spice up your devotion.’

  ‘I’ll be one with that!’ called out a voice, as bleating as a goat’s, from the board beyond ours.

  I turned to examine the speaker. He was a weedy man with lank blond hair which spilled over his shoulders like rats-tails. Atop the thin hair was perched a cap, onto which he had sewn a scallop – the badge of a pilgrim.

  A pardoner, I thought with some disgust – knowing the breed only too well. A man who carried with him scrolls which offered a short cut to Paradise – but only for those who could afford to pay his price. I, for one, would rather spend a hundred thousand years in purgatory than hand over any of my money to such a thing as he was.

  ‘You, good sir, are a man of true spirit!’ our host said approvingly to the pardoner.

  I, personally, doubted that. To judge by the lack of hair on his chin, the pardoner did not look like any kind of man at all.

  ‘Shall I tell you how I propose you should break up the monotony of your bone-shaking ride to Canterbury?’ the host asked, though he took no pause to allow us to say yea or nay. ‘God willing – for only He truly knows what lies ahead - it will take you four days to travel to the blessed martyr’s shrine, and four more days to make the return journey. Is that not ample time each of you to tell four tales?’

  It was ample time to do many things, I thought – though I must admit that the taking of human life was one I did not consider.

  ‘So why not follow my suggestion, and do just that?’ the host asked. ‘You could even make a contest out of it. And if you did, I would gladly accompany you and be your judge. And he who tells the best tale shall be given a prize. He will be bought a meal on our return, at this very inn, that the losers shall pay for.’

  In my Tales - as those who have read them will know - I paint a picture of the whole gathering falling in with his scheme immediately. But that, of course, was simply a device for the conveniences of literature, and it is not literature I am writing now but a true account of what actually occurred.