Hurdy Gurdy Page 9

  That first night we lay apart either side of our crackling fire.

  The second night, we both grew cold and made a pact to lie close, and share our cover, with me behind, pressing into her back, snuggled tight to the warmth of her contours.

  On the third night, the cold was crueller still and reached through to sting our bones.

  We turned to face each other, arms about each other, hugging chest to chest.

  Still, the cold grew sterner, setting its icy heart against us, as if to freeze our blood.

  We were forced to put our faces close together, so our warm breaths were shared, then our hot mouths joined, and each felt the fiery pulse of the other, until we became one body, joined tight, melted into each other, like a beast with two backs, and just one set of fleas.

  Then the cold was gone.

  XII. The Seven True Differences between Man and Woman

  So, by the happenchance of a meeting in the woods and a mercilessly chilly night, I began to fill a yawning void in my knowledge. For, despite passing my sixteenth year, and reading all the profound works of Saint Odo, and hearing all the wise teachings of Brother Fulco, I had gained only small, abstract knowledge of Woman. The little I had learned was just ill-founded rumours from celibate scholars, who had touched upon no skin but vellum, and dipped no more than their pen, wetting no more than their nib.

  But now I had met Woman for myself and embraced her, in the raw flesh. And found her solid and tangible. Also sonorous. Warm to the touch. A fond taste upon my tongue, and aromatic. Sweet and salty, dry and wet, firm and soft. So I held her more and closer, avid in my curiosity.

  And while it is true that she was just a single instance of Woman, and not the broad plurality of her gender, still I was able to grasp her every fine detail and make abundant rich discoveries across the continents of her surface, and committed every last patch of it to memory, even the remotest, shadiest, overgrown places, concealing the smallest cracks and crannies. So I should know the best routes and finest sites whenever I should have the fortune to visit again.

  I found fine, rich delights in erasing my ignorance, in discerning the several ways the male and the female were alike in form, and the seven true ways they diverged, and the details of every difference, however slight, wherever I chanced upon them.

  I discerned the Divine Design to fabricate the distaff – out of that spare rib of Adam’s – in many ways alike to the male, yet fairer, smoother and softer and mossy-haired, with wider hips, plumper, cushioned curves, and gentle hillocks, with fewer hard, bony corners, differently perfumed, and without Man’s braggart, dangling parts, as a hostage to fortune, and target to harsh buffets, in a hard, spiky world.

  I took to my investigations with an aching vigour and an itching curiosity. There were times in my dark enquiry when my view was shaded or obscured – for the cold compelled us to keep ourselves most parts covered. Still, I believe that there was no portion or region of her fundament that passed untouched by my hand, no scent undetected by the nose, and no tang or flavour untasted by the tongue.

  True, there were times when I lost the thread of my enquiry. For I went light-headed, in that state between dreams and wakefulness. I was distracted by a vague, jerky reverie. I was provoked by odd, illogical thrusts of desire. I was drawn by drunk attractions. Stupidly, I kept repeating my jerky awkwardness, over and over, again and again, before starting anew. I was straining to make up for all those lost, womanless years.

  All that I belatedly discovered was good. I saw Man could not help but delight in the Divine Design, and rejoice in that fine fit to be found by joining Man and Woman.

  Praise be to God.

  In the morning, Woman surprised me anew.

  I opened my eyes to the misty, dawning light to find her tousle-haired head close above mine, with her moist, sleep-crusted eyes smiling down at me, as her warm breath gusted my cheeks.

  ‘Good morning, Husband,’ she said.

  ‘Good morning,’ I said.

  ‘You should call me Wife,’ she said. ‘Now we are married.’

  ‘Married?’ I said.

  ‘In the sight of God,’ she said. ‘To be bonny and buxom at bed and at board, to love and to cherish, till death us part, according to God’s holy ordinance; and thereunto I plighted thee my troth …’

  I stayed silent and cast my mind back to the hours passed, to try to recall any declaration, or ceremony, or celebration of marriage. But none came to mind.

  ‘What will my family say?’ She threw her head back, giggling. ‘When I return home with you, and say, “Look, here is my husband … who goes by the name of Jack … and is not the fool he first appears … who I found, wandering, woeful as a lost dog, with his tail between his legs, by Coppetts Pond, in the woods.”’

  ‘Fool?’ I said. ‘Woeful?’

  ‘So, you should give me a ring,’ she said, ‘to show the world we are married.’

  ‘Yes?’ I said.

  ‘Like this one you wear on a cord around your neck.’ She reached out to rub it between finger and thumb, then had it ride the tip of her finger. It was the bronze ring that Luke, my mother’s father, gave to me, before he left me on the steps of the monastery.

  ‘Yes?’ I said.

  ‘Look,’ she said, twisting it onto her finger, having wet it with a gob of spit, ‘how well it fits.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘So it does.’

  She spoke of where we might live. Close by her family. And how I might help her father tend the land and husband the beasts. She spoke of the sturdy, fine-looking children we might have, and the names we might give them. Like Ada, Adelina, Albreda, Alice, or Alban, Aldo, Ambrose, Anselm or August.

  But I cautioned that perhaps we would not need so many child names and certainly not so very soon.

  Saint Odo wrote of the future time when people trapped the scintilla vitalis, the vital spark, and carried it from place to place, in long tubes like umbilicals. This way, once connected, the inert and the dead came alive. Lights dazzled, fires burst ablaze, bells rang, voices sounded out of silence, pictures glowed out of darkness, water froze or turned into steam. Then everything was noise, light and movement. And darkness and silence were gone from the face of the world.

  Later came the Age of the Metal Carts. These were covered, horseless carriages that ran on wheels, and farted black fumes, so even far in their wake you could smell they had travelled the road before, and fouled it for all that followed. They roared and growled. Sometimes they charged each other, head on, like rutting stags. Other times, they passed without any regard to each other, or else crowded together, in stationary flocks, like sheep.

  The time of the Shape-Shifters was later still. These were folk who changed their human shape. For they were not satisfied with the visages and bodies God gave them, but paid craftsmen to change them. Even though it was heresy. Usurping the Almighty, never heeding that the human form was good and immutable, for it was fashioned to the Divine Design.

  The Shape-Shifters paid skin-scribes to pierce them with needles dipped in ink, so they could be drawn upon, as if they themselves were some sheet of vellum. So they bore the dates of their children’s birth, the names of their kin, the face of their loved one, secret signs, marks of the Devil, warnings for strangers to go away, flowers, eagles, sign-posts to their privates, or morals misspelled in foreign tongues, or invitations to intimacy, and pleasantries the first time funny.

  And some paid blacksmiths to pierce them with studs, rings, bolts, through their faces, tongues, lips, cheeks, nipples and privities. So you could always find them in the dark, for they glinted back the moon-glow and rattled when they walked.

  Others paid for doctors to stretch their cheeks taut as drum-skins. So they resembled skulls. And paid apothecaries to paralyse their face with poison, so they could not be ruffled by emotion. So feelings could not trespass across their visage, crease the surface and line them with experience. For they believed that growing old was a venial sin.

  An
d they had their complexion painted orange. And raised their eyebrows, like flying buttresses, vaulting towards the heavens. And swelled their lips like the pout of a trout. And swelled their bosoms larger than wet-nurses’. And had the flesh sucked out of their bellies and pushed back into their buttocks instead, so then their lumps were back to front. And snipped their privates and bleached their bottoms.

  So some parts of their corpus were made larger. And some made smaller. And some flatter. And some bumpier. And some lighter and some darker. And some harder and some softer. And some longer and some shorter.

  It was like the Sumptuary Law we have now. Just as only the rich or powerful may wear fur, fine fabric or purple, so only the wealthy could join the Tribe of the Skull. So fine looks became a purchase. And the poor folk were excluded from the parade of beauty, left looking as plain and alive as God had shaped them. For they could not afford the medicine to make them look like rich, embalmed corpses.

  But, oh, woe.

  The worst came upon us.

  We had been followed. Cecilia and I.

  A terrible evil had crept up on us.

  On the third day my new wife woke vexed and listless, her forehead beaded with sweat, her teeth chattering, with a violent heat to her body. She had a terrible throbbing ache to her head, she said, and was too weak to rise.

  There was a rich, putrid tang that I had not scented on her before. But I had smelled it on my departed brothers when I laid them to rest.

  May God have mercy on their souls.

  ‘Oh, wife …’ I sighed. ‘Dear wife … you can’t go so very soon.’

  We had only been married a couple of days. And now she was all but lost to me.

  ‘Husband?’ she asked, croaky and weak.

  There were lumps on her neck the size of pigeon eggs, and more nested in her arm-pits and groin.

  She bent sideways to a bout of coughing, and a treacly black stuff trickled from the side of her mouth.

  I saw a couple of fleas jump forth from the valley between her breasts, leaping an arc to the ground, and I thought of them as desperate mariners, throwing themselves to the broad ocean, fleeing the sinking ship.

  All day, as I tended her, the buboes slowly swelled and grew darker. The tips of her fingers and her nose became purpled. There was the smell of the black rot, eating its way through her, from the insides to the surface.

  ‘I feel sick unto death,’ she whispered, blowing bloody bubbles. Every word a struggle for breath.

  ‘Will you confess?’ I asked. ‘Take care for your immortal soul.’

  So, she mumbled the worst she had ever done. Which was little enough, but laboured in its coming, on brief, brave gusts of shame.

  Except that she confessed she had thrown the two skulls I bore in my bag into the pond. She said they scared her, and made her uneasy. She feared they’d bring bad luck. For it was sinister, she said, to travel with dead men’s bones. And did I mind?

  So I prayed for Saint Odo to forgive her. Twice. For she knew not what she did.

  Then I spoke the Absolution and drew the sign of the cross on her forehead.

  May the Almighty and Merciful God grant you pardon, and remission of your sins.

  May the Almighty God have mercy on you, and bring you to life everlasting. Amen.

  Shortly after, I heard her final snort, which was her soul departing, in a rush. So I watched her go, riding the breeze, to eternity, blown out in a fine, blood-speckled spray of snot from her nose.

  Then I closed the lids of her eyes.

  Then I cried.

  And, after that, I howled.

  A distant fox answered me. A brother in yearning. A dog-fox calling out for his vixen.

  I dug my wife under. But I saw it was not her any more – only the rattle-bag of an empty husk. Her spirit was gone elsewhere. I placed a wooden cross on the grave and gouged out the name Cecilia on the cross-piece, and below it in smaller script I scratched, ‘Brief, beloved wife of Jack’.

  I fell asleep, to the tang of my hot salty tears.

  But next morning I woke refreshed by hope, with a calm contentment. A clarity had come to my muddled mind. My thoughts flowed limpid and fresh, the sediments settled.

  I realised that everything has a purpose, shaped by His Divine will. And nothing is for nothing.

  The pox was dogging me, claiming everyone I met. Yet always leaving me to live. Which I took as a sign that the pestilence and I were entwined, fellow travellers, with our fates joined. I faced up to the facts of my life. I saw the pattern that they revealed. How I had been fathered not by a peasant but by a Papal messenger, and was delivered up to a monastery, gifted to learn the wisdoms of Saint Odo, taught the science of Brother Fulco, trained to treat the sick. So I realised then that I was special and chosen. That I was here for His purpose, and had been given a task, in order to follow the pestilence, find its cause, and thereby its cure. That man should learn his moral lesson and regain the love of the Lord.

  Praise be to God.

  Any word is two words. And any meaning is the difference between them. Brother Fulco had taught me so. For after Grammar, Rhetoric, Gardening and Gymnastics, he went on to teach me Semantics, the study of meanings.

  So he showed me that once you give birth to a single word – like alive, you have brought to life its opposite – dead.

  And once you have the opposite, by implication you create its contrary, what it is not – un-dead, like demons and spirits, and then the opposite of that contrary – un-alive, like the ghosts.

  So then, out of one word, you have made four words – the quartet of possibility – the alive, the dead, the un-dead, the un-alive.

  Which allows for six further meanings. The combinations. For some things are jumbled, like those that are both living and dead. And the un-alive and the un-dead, and the dead and the un-alive. And so on.

  This way you can comprehend Our Lord Christ who was dead but rose again alive, departed souls that are gone from life but alive in Purgatory, Heaven or Hell, and the lost, shocked souls, like ghosts and ghouls, who died but cannot free themselves from the realm of the living to find their proper homes beyond.

  The mind reaches out for strange consolations. I conjectured that though my dear wife Cecilia was dead, still she was alive … and also alive and dead when I looked at it sideways … and moreover both un-dead and un-alive in another way of seeing things … and yet alive and un-dead, locked in my memory, and tied to my heart by love, attached to my desire by strands of longing … furthermore alive yet un-alive to Purgatory, having died well – confessed and absolved.

  So now she was more than alive, and shimmered into several meanings, like the lights of the rainbow scattered by a prism.

  All of which made me feel better, and my wife closer. And distant too. And yet both together.

  For Brother Fulco had taught me another thing.

  He showed me that any word is three words. For any word creates its opposite. And between them there must lie the middle-term that joins and resolves them.

  So between sky and sea comes the earth. Between day and night comes dusk. Between night and day comes dawn. Between love and hate is indifference. Between God and man comes Jesus Christ, both human and Divine. And between Heaven and Earth are the angels as messengers to us.

  Between woman and fish comes the mermaid. Between woman and bird is the harpy. And between man and goat is the faun. And between man and horse is the centaur.

  So the scholars say. That Our Lord left no opposition unresolved. Every two dissimilar things will find their mix on God’s Earth. Only sometimes you must look hard to find them. And sometimes it is better not to lift the stone. Or wander into that dark place.

  XIII. I Dance Barnaby and Sup at the Mossy Well

  Now I walked out with purpose. And without fear.

  I saw that I was some way joined to this pestilence, by some invisible tie, and that it had the power to find me, wherever I went. It would not hurt me now. For I had fought it the fir
st time and survived. The second time it visited, it left me barely touched. Only the sweats and headaches bothered me. The blue spots were small and largely gone.

  So, whatever the pestilence sought, it wasn’t me.

  I was no longer afraid of contagion in crowded places. I took to the wider paths. I let the Lord guide my feet.

  Next day, I find He leads me to the inn of the Seven Stars in the village of Ravenstone. It seems as good a place as any. He always has His reasons.

  The inn is crowded. And I had forgot how strong a herd of folk can smell in their plurality – of warm, damp armpits, excrement, rotten teeth, mildewed clothes, woodsmoke, simmering pottage, and stale spilled ale. There is a smoky fug and a clamour of shouting, laughter, singing, fiddle and drum.

  I sit myself on a bench alongside an old man, hunched smiling over his pot of ale. He says his name is Michael and that he is a travelling cobbler.

  ‘They say there’s a pox abroad,’ I say, ‘but folk seem happy. Has the news not reached here yet?’

  ‘The plague?’ He shrugs. ‘What can we do?’

  ‘Repent,’ I suggest. ‘Suffer. Pray for God’s forgiveness … Hide … Flee.’

  ‘I’ll tell you how it is …’ He pauses to raise his eyes heavenward. ‘There has never been a more dire and terrible happening, not in Northampton, not in the surrounding parts, nor in cobbling in particular.’

  ‘Cobbling?’

  ‘I am a shoe-maker.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘And do you know who buys shoes since the plague struck?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Nobody.’ He smacked the table-top with the flat of his hand.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Those departed this life don’t need shoes. The rest are too busy fleeing. Besides, the dead only make matters worse.’

  ‘They do?’

  ‘Yes, for they leave their footwear behind them. So, now, there are many more shoes than feet …’