Hurdy Gurdy Read online

  Christopher Wilson

  HURDY GURDY

  For Janet Hesketh

  and for Robin Miller Kennedy

  I am out with lanterns, looking for myself.

  EMILY DICKINSON

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Anno Domini 1349–1352

  I. The Discovery of Women

  II. Succubus

  III. The Weight of the Soul

  IV. Love in God’s Garden

  V. It Rains Scorpions and the Earth Bleeds

  VI. The Tournament of Smells

  VII. Hurdy Gurdy

  VIII. God Only Knows

  IX. The Cure for Life

  X. Into the Woods

  XI. I Chance upon Woman and Find Her Good

  XII. The Seven True Differences between Man and Woman

  XIII. I Dance Barnaby and Sup at the Mossy Well

  XIV. The Sin-Eater

  XV. If Your Eye Offend You, Pluck it Out

  XVI. We Happy Band of Pilgrims

  XVII. Wise Agnes in the Dark

  XVIII. The Pig’s Tale

  XIX. Telling Stories

  XX. Poxed

  XXI. The World Is Broke Apart

  XXII. The Return

  XXIII. I Find My Home and Helpmeet

  XXIV. The Secrets of Woman and Her Dark Interior

  XXV. Aristotle Misleads Me

  XXVI. Fox’s Law

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  ANNO DOMINI

  1349–1352

  I. The Discovery of Women

  When I died the first time, the Good Lord took pity on my boy’s frail sparrow frame, caught the fleeing beat of my heart, and blew the breath back into my still-warm body. Then he laid me back into this nest of life, like some tumbled, trampled hatchling, shivering, squawking and ruffle-feathered, judging my death was come too soon, that I still had use, and had to live, learn and suffer more.

  This was in the season of the plague, in the twenty-first year of Our Lord King Edward, Long-Hair, the Great Unbuttoned – may God preserve him – who loves his peoples sorely, especially the women.

  The world was younger then, still raw. The edges of our Earth had not been mapped, and many oceans and continents remained unknown to folk. The colours were sharp, freshly daubed by His Divine brush, and the sounds new as dew, and the feel of things prickled sharp as nettles. And, yes, I pledge on the jeopardy of my immortal soul. I saw it all, with my young eyes. From start to end.

  And may Lucifer, and his infernal demons, make a feet-ball of my bonce, a wine-gourd of my bladder, a purse of my scrotum, then pluck my eye-balls for ink-wells, stretch my guts for bow-strings, fry my liver for break-fast, and griddle my guts for all time, if a word of this sorry history turns out to be a lie.

  Never forget. In Hell a man weeps more tears than all the waters of all the oceans. While his brains are boiled in vinegar for all eternity. As his flesh is chewed from his bones by demons. Then straightaway sprouts back to be chewed anew.

  But get to know me, first. Here, grasp the sturdy peg of my name, to hang the tale on. To tell me apart from the rest of the stubborn, bleating, woolly, dag-arsed flock. So I am not just another bag of offal and shit, skittering on the hoof, braying his way unthinking to the butcher’s hook.

  Perhaps you’ve heard of me before. I’m known as Jack Fox. So I rhyme, face and arse, with the Black Pox.

  I was delivered to God’s Earth sixteen years before, out of the belly of a woman, clothed in transient flesh, destined for dust, but possessed of an immortal soul.

  I became a novice of the Order of Odo. You are given a fresh name when you enter the monastery, for then you are reborn to Christ. So I was baptised Brother Diggory, in my life as a monk.

  See it. In your mind’s eye. We are here, surrounded by the patchwork of pastures and dark woods. In the heart of our soggy, green island, as far from the sea as you can be.

  This is our monastery. My home. Before you. God’s house at Whye. A long, low, crumbling, grey-stone, thatched hovel, looming out of the mist, like a beasts’ barn, slumped next to a ruin, floating in a marsh.

  Mind the puddles and cowpats as you trudge close, through the fog of your imagination. Follow the good guidance of your nostrils, and trot dainty around the shit-pit.

  The flies are God’s ornaments, ignorant and pitiful creatures, like ourselves. They are our moral guides. They remind us even small lives matter. They warn us we are tiny beings, and frail like them, and that some giant hand, or some Divine cow’s tail, may suddenly swish down from above, and slap us flat.

  Splat.

  To a still, damp smudge.

  Praise the Lord for the wonders of Creation.

  Some creatures He made to soar through the airs, some to trot the earth on cloven hooves, some to squirm the muds like worms, some to swim the depths. Some He made to chew on grass, some to sup on stale shit.

  Yet for others He made a plentiful provision of sturgeon simmered in butter with thyme and wild garlic, stuffed with samphire, crayfish tails and chestnuts, crusted with grated cheese, dusted with crocus pollen, to be eaten with golden spoons from crystal bowls in marbled halls. For to each of us He gave a branch to perch, high or low, in the Tree of His Creation.

  Smile. It’s not so dismal as it first appears. Duck your sorry sinner’s head, and stoop to enter in. Your eyes will soon adjust to the gloom. You’ll grow used to the odours, too. They arise from the innocent juices of holy men, squirting out from our moist, too-human bodies. On a cold day, at prayer in the chapel, the damp rises from our hunched shoulders like morning mist off the turf. We struggle to keep our hearts clean. But we are leaky sacks of sweaty skin, and we bathe just once a year on Bathday Thursday – just after Lent.

  Never care. We wash our feet weekly, on Fridays, for they constantly tread upon the dirt of the world. So any less often would be unclean.

  Our founder, Saint Odo of Whye, was a holy spirit in a mighty man, set apart from his fellows, and high above us, through his sanctity, his kindness, and his perfect, flawless ugliness – possessed of a face that left none unmoved. But made bold men wince, gulp and gasp, for they did not recognise the topmost part of him – poking out from his collar – as a human head. For it better suggested some raw lump of gristle. You’d best imagine a throbbing, blood-wet, glistening lump of carcass, discarded on the killing-floor, after a beast was butchered.

  Saint Odo the Ugly had two supernatural skills. He had prescience and he had duality.

  He could see far ahead. In time. For his herbs – hemlock, poppy, henbane, hemp – advised him. They opened his eyes, to peer through the fogs of nowadays and mists of tomorrows, clear to far future ages.

  This way, he saw strange machines, buildings big as mountains, underwater boats, giant metal birds that held people in their bowels, and spewed them out at the front, and shat them out through their back passage, and pestilences, and foul wars to come, and the orange-faced king, Small Hands, with straw-yellow hair wound round his head like a helmet, who said that truths were lies, and lies were truths, that the Seven Acts of Mercy were sins, so the sick should be left to cure themselves, and the homeless should house themselves, the dead should bury themselves, and that the poor should build a wall to keep themselves out.

  Also, Odo could bilocate.

  That’s our Latin scribe’s way of saying he could be in two places at once. Or, to tell it another way, appear as two separate people. Albeit identical. And this is why he is known, by his full name, as Saint Odo and Saint Odo, of Here and There.

  It’s said that Odo could often be found sleeping in his cot in his cell, while nursing the sick in the sanatorium. O
r bathing in the lake, while studying in the library. Or chanting in the chapel, while baking bread in the outhouse. The variations were endless. And he was known never to spare this great gift, but to always tire it to exhaustion with perpetual, ingenious use.

  Now, one hundred and thirty years after his ascent to the heavens, only his skull-bone remains to us, separated from its lower jaw, as a precious relic. It is held in two sealed reliquary chests behind the altar in the chapel. Once a year, on Saint Odo’s Day, the Abbot opens the boxes and declares where the bone has found its rest – be it to the left ivory box or the right cedar-wood box.

  Then, as always, when it is to be found in both boxes at once, the brothers sing their praises, O dulcis electe, with whoops of wonder, and a loud acclaim, knowing it is a certain and remarkable proof that Saint Odo is close, lives on in his noble spirit, and moves amongst us still, both here and there.

  Saint Odo left us one marvellous memento. The great gift of his example. For he gave his life to the care of the sick. He tended those wretched and despised. But it’s known he reserved his deepest love for the sickest and ugliest, and those most desperately deformed, and the demented, the deluded, the tangle-limbed, the incontinent, the scabby and foul-smelling.

  In tending the sick – folk tormented with swellings, boils, scrofula, weeping wounds and sores – he would forever suffer the same contagions of skin himself. Over time, this taxed his complexion, laying scab upon scar, till he gained a patina so bloated, monstrous-scaled, reddened and purpled that he could not show himself to strangers without causing them distress or offence. Or perhaps to drop into a faint. This way he became known as Saint Odo the Disfigured and became patron of the ugly, all those who suffer some blemish of the body or soul, and champion of curs, waifs, dogs and the despised.

  Our brotherhood is not a large one like those Benedictines or Carthusians, but a small, poor band of thirty-nine brothers, possessed of a single monastery.

  We are known as the Dingy Brothers. For we all wear a cloth of dirty grey. Turned damp brown or black at the hems. We live simply but we do not seek out our poverty like the Franciscans or embrace it like the Dominicans. No. We are poor without trying. We are poor because we are poor. For we have not been blessed with riches. Not yet. But our time may come, if the Lord only wills it. And we are gentle souls, not fighters like the Hospitallers, Templars or Teutonic Knights.

  We strive to live gently, quietly and kindly, like our founder Odo, praising the Lord, praying for the world, studying diseases that we may conquer them, devising medicines, treating the sick, tending our garden, and copying our manuscripts.

  Odo’s greatest work, his opus magnum was his grand treatise titled The Book of Life: All that Lives and Breathes in God’s Kingdom, detailing all forms and varieties of life that wander the land, swim the waters and fly the airs, stoke the fires of Hell, and sanctify the heavens. There is not one type of living creature that is not described in his book. This is why it extends over two hundred pages.

  Odo also studied anatomy, detailing the organs of the human body, not just of Man but reaching out to Woman too. And so he is credited with the first true discovery of Woman, for he showed beyond contradiction that there was more to woman than met the eye. So that she was not just a small lumpen man with male private parts turned inside out – an invert, as scholars supposed – but a separate and complete form of being, possessed of her very own intricate anatomy, with much more concealed in her deep interior than the outsides ever betrayed.

  But, since the dissection of the dead is strictly forbidden by the Church, as a desecration of God’s Own handiwork, he derived these careful and exact anatomical truths, concerning Man and Woman, from observing the insides of pigs, which animals, it is to be believed, most closely resemble the human pattern. Providing you disregard the oink, trotters and curly tail. Mutatis mutandis.

  Praise be to God.

  Odo writes too of the Monstrous Tribes of the West, including the Dog-Heads, the Fire-Breathers, the Mermen (half-fish, half-men) and the Giant One-Legs, who cause the ground to shudder as they hop from place to place. The Headless Men are known as Akephaloi or Blemmyes, first discovered by Gervase of Tilbury who came upon them on the Island of Brisone, close by the Two Sicilies. They lack a head or neck. So their face is displaced upon their chest, with the eyes placed where the nipples should be, above a nose in the centre of their chest, with a greedy mouth below, curved to the shape of a horse-shoe.

  Their brain is so squashed in their chest by the other organs – lungs, heart and liver – that it makes them giddy and forgetful. So you must not expect much of their wit, science or scholarship. Although they prove jolly and friendly companions, if over-fond of wines.

  And Odo also wrote a second, later book, his opuscule – The Great Unhappened: Being a Record of the Yet Undone – which records those things still to come, in a future that only he had seen. Telling of strange objects and events, on their way, coming to future times.

  He said there would be viewing-machines which were metal tubes with polished glass ends. Through one end you could see the distant made large. And through the other you could spy the close made small. Depending upon your choice. Also he told of the voice tablets, which were small tiles with a mosaic surface, little enough to lie in the flat of your hand. Yet, if you knew the codex, and touched the exact squares in a certain special sequence, you could speak to people who were not there, but were far away, though they sounded as close as if whispering into your ear. So though they spoke loud, their voices were disembodied. Also, there would be icy cold drinks, in small, squat suits of armour, bursting with bubbles that prickled your tongue. And a metal box with a glass window that cooked your food without any fire, just by turning it through circles on a glass platter. And winter-machines that turned warm, summer waters into ice, flying carriages and music plates, and picture-chests showing the shadows of people, flickering before your eyes as if alive. These are marvellous things to come. Along with monstrous wars and terrible pestilences, as we trudge to the future, alongside Lucifer, strutting, swaggering, aiming to undo us and nudge us into the damp, muddy ditch of sin.

  Spare my quills.

  This vellum is bristly as Brother Michael’s arse.

  We brothers live to do God’s work. We welcome the wretched and infirm. We take in the destitute and the despised. We maintain a sick-house for the treatment of all ailments, of the body, the mind and the spirit.

  Our sacred rules forbid us to laugh. For, as the Abbot always cautions us, we are not beasts, like braying asses, that have lost control of their faculties. Nor bleating sheep, incontinent of our emotions.

  But we are free to smile on feast days, to show our joy at God’s bounty.

  And, on the first four Thursdays after Lent, we are welcome to play. Within reason, in moderation. Between Vespers and Compline. But without dice or idolatry. And without any thought of woman.

  And here lies my problem.

  For, in recent months, I find my thoughts, like wanton, frisky goats, stray from the pastures of my work – my daily tasks of copying and prayer – and jump the fence of discipline, verging upon women.

  For women just come to mind. Quite uninvited. By day and by night. And mostly by night. Without welcome, rhyme or reason. There is no respite from their visitations. Not even while I sleep. For I have even begun to dream of them. Of She. Of Her.

  The Nameless One.

  Who comes to me in my deepest slumber so I wake startled, my swollen loins inflamed, with a fear and a shame and a throbbing ache. But She is just some spirit of the dark, who is gone as soon as I wake and flick open my startled eyes.

  II. Succubus

  I know enough. There is evil here, and sin clinging close. And danger in its shadows. So I ask Brother Fulco for a special confession.

  He is the master, and I am the pupil.

  He was appointed my mentor, to cuff my ears and guide my eternal soul. He has raised me with piety, and a kindness well hidden behi
nd a harsh tongue and a hard hand. He taught me the four humours and the four elements, to speak the French like a noble, to write the Latin like a scholar, to speak the Rhetoric like a lawyer, to work the numbers like a merchant, to use the herbs like an apothecary, to play the Hurdy Gurdy till it sings like a musical instrument, to squirrel my secrets, to fox a follower, to hold my tongue like a mole, and to know my place as close and tight as a snail knows its shell. He is my guide on the twisty cliff-path to salvation. He knows the giddy heights. He knows the loose stones underfoot.

  He is an old, bent, furrow-faced, rheumy man now. For he has been on this Earth over fifty-odd years, and outlived his brittle bones. He understands a brother’s trials and temptations. He is our herbalist. Our astrologer. Our doctor and our surgeon. He is a man of science and reason as well as of faith.

  ‘Yes, Diggory, my son?’ he demands. His face wrinkled as a walnut, creased deep with life’s concerns. The skin below each eye sags with its dark pouch of sorrow.

  ‘I am visited in my sleep,’ I say.

  ‘Visited?’

  ‘A stranger comes to me.’

  ‘Yes? What stranger?’

  ‘A woman.’

  ‘A woman?’ Brother Fulco clucks his surprise and blinks his concern. He taps his head, as if to shake the idea clean out of his mind, like the stone from a shoe. Then he grimaces. ‘What can you know of women, Brother Diggory?’

  I shrug. I prickle. I blush.

  In truth, he is right. For I am a stranger to women, as they are strangers to me. For though I once came out from the belly of a woman, in the customary way, by the usual path, that was as a baby. And I have never before thought to return.

  I have spent my life with men and boys. So I do not know the ways and whys and wherefores of women, their parts, habits, moods, sayings, manners or their minds. Though I have read much of that particular and peculiar sex – the late after-thought of God’s Creation – and heard tell of them in the scriptures, and have witnessed many women in passing in my sixteen years, and heard them sing, squabble, giggle and chatter in the meadows. It has always been beyond arm’s length. And usually up-wind.