A Burnable Book. Bruce Holsinger

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       TWO

       Gropecunt Lane, Ward of Cheap

      Eleanor Rykener grunted, spat, wiped her lips. The friar covered his shrivelled knob. Wouldn’t meet her eyes, of course. Franciscans, they never liked to look. He dropped his groats on the straw. ‘Why thank you, Brother Michael,’ she said, her voice a sullen nip. The friar stared coldly at some spot on her neck, then shrugged on his cowl, edged around the old mare, and left the stall.

      When she had dressed, Eleanor stepped out into the light rain, looking down toward the stone cross before St Pancras. The friar wouldn’t give that a glance either as he slunk around the corner of the churchyard toward Soper Lane. She raised her face to the sky, cleansing his piety from her tongue.

      ‘Regular as these little oinkers here.’ Mary Potts leaned against a post, gesturing to a dozen pigs nosing street muck.

      Eleanor tossed her gossip a tired smile. ‘And never has the good grace to render me confession after I grant him service.’

      They stood in silence for a while, watching the flow of late-afternoon traffic up along Cheapside, the creak of old wheels, the low calls of sheep, the urgings of hucksters, though the din seemed always distant from the ladies of Gropecunt Lane, a quiet byway of leased horsestalls and abandoned shopfronts that absorbed sound the way a dry rag absorbs ale, and as central as St Paul’s to the human business of London. Every now and then this business would be theirs, as some desiring man, face to the ground, mind on slit, would make the turn and find a maudlyn to take his groats and squirt. Despite the lane’s reputation, the girls kept things tidy, raking the dirt and pavers themselves, cleaning up after animal and man alike. It was their own small piece of the city, where jakes plucked coin from their purses and maudlyns tucked it into theirs, the ordinances be damned. A simple thing.

      ‘Afternoon, m’pretties!’

      Eleanor turned. Joan Rugg lifted her skirts as she hopped from stone to stone in a vain attempt to avoid the mud.

      ‘What now what now what now,’ Mary Potts murmured.

      With a final grunt, Joan heaved herself on to the pavers fronting the stalls and straightened her dress, a shapeless thing of stained wool. The Dun Bell, Joan’s girls called their bawd, with three chins stacked against her neck, lips full and always moist, beady eyes that moved more quickly than any other part of her, and a mass of matted hair entwined through the band of a wide hat she never removed. This, a splendid circle of leather and wool adorned with flowers of faded silk, had been given to her by a lover in her youth, she liked to recall. On that misty day its perch lent her large form an air of botanical mystery, as if the viewer were approaching a mountaintop garden above the clouds, or some strange, Edenic island in the sea. ‘You ladies seen our Agnes?’ she asked.

      ‘Not today,’ said Mary Potts.

      ‘Thought you sent her up Westminster on Tuesday,’ said Eleanor, suddenly concerned. As far as she knew Agnes Fonteyn had been consorting with one of the king’s substewards, a long-time jake who would request Agnes’s company for a few days at a time during royal absences.

      ‘Didn’t come through.’ Joan raised her sleeve to scratch at her forearm. ‘But I had a particular request for her this morning, from a fine gentleman of the Mercery. And a procuratrix’d like to make arrangements, right?’

      ‘You talked to her mother down Southwark?’ Mary asked.

      ‘Sign of the Pricking Bishop,’ Eleanor added quickly, naming a common house in the stews where Agnes’s mother had long peddled flesh.

      Joan scoffed. ‘Would’ve had to wait in line a half day to get a word in. That whore’s swyving makes her daughter look like St Margaret.’

      ‘Did you try her sister?’ Eleanor said. ‘Lives up Cornhull.’

      Joan wagged her head. ‘Took a peek in her fancy house, asked about a bit in Broad Street, but no sight of her ladyship.’

      A dungcart turned up from St Pancras on the way to the walls, banded wheels groaning under the weight, the waste of man and beast souring the air. When the clatter receded, Joan turned back to them. ‘Can’t have my maudlyns vanishing on me, not with Lents about to pass, appetites built up as they are. Forty days of nothing, then a week of everything, in my experience.’

      Mary groaned, her arms wrapping a post. ‘Shoulda been a nun, shouldn’t I, maybe took vows with them Benedictines?’

      ‘Ah, but then you’d really be getting it in every hole, my dear,’ said Joan wisely.

      The two of them shared the laughter for a bit, attracting a few looks from other girls up the lane as Eleanor clasped her hands in worry. Joan put a hand to her chin. With a sidelong glance at Eleanor, she said, ‘Agnes got a little spot, though, don’t she? Out in the Moorfields.’

      ‘A small walk short of Bethlem,’ said Eleanor with a natural shudder. ‘I’ve been there with her.’ This was Agnes’s ‘lair’, as she called it: an old hunter’s blind outside the city walls where some of her wealthier jakes liked to take her, along with any other maudlyns they could cajole. They were, for the most part, young, reckless men with too much time and coin on their hands. Or fellows whose names might start with Sir.

      ‘Go have a look then, will you?’ said Joan. Her sweetest wheedle.

      Eleanor hesitated. ‘Rather not go alone.’

      Joan heaved a shoulder at Mary. ‘Take the child with you. Be back bell of six, or shortly after. Sky looks to be clearing, so we’ll likely be busy tonight, the blood of London rising strong.’

      Mary, playing the genteel, crooked her elbow. Eleanor took her arm, and they left Joan Rugg standing beside the stalls. ‘Bell of six now,’ the bawd called after them. Eleanor waved an acknowledgment, only too glad to escape her sticky work for a few hours, though quite worried for Agnes.

      A muddy trudge in the drizzle took them along Cheapside past the Standard at le Vout, where two vagrants hunching in the stocks chewed at tack as a one-armed boy softened the biscuits in ale. A straight course up Wood Street and they were at Cripplegate. Eleanor looked up as they passed beneath the gatehouse, the prisoners idling behind the high grates, the keepers СКАЧАТЬ