To Calais, In Ordinary Time. James Meek

he’s in Calais, and you’re here?’

      ‘He’s not in Calais. He’s in Wiltshire for Saturday’s joust, and leaves for France next day.’

      Pogge folded her arms. ‘Only account for this,’ she said. ‘Your father would marry you to his friend. Yet your Laurence is, by your description, an excellent young man of a good family, with prospects for advancement. If he loves you, why not ask your father if he may have you?’

      ‘He requested, and was refused. Laurence has no daughter marriageable, whereas Sir Hennery does. And my father judges himself, like Sir Hennery, a widower in need of a wife.’

      ‘Berna!’

      ‘I wouldn’t tell you, it’s so dishonourable. Their intention is that Sir Hennery arrive, we marry on Saturday, we journey to Somerset with my father, and there, after harvest, celebrate a second wedding, between my father and my new husband’s daughter.’

      Pogge bared her teeth. ‘Outrageous,’ she said.

      ‘Is it not hideous? I and this other poor maid are our own dowries.’

      ‘Can the clerks allow such a bargain?’

      ‘You see why I speak of martyrdom. I’ve never prayed more than now, and if the archdeacon will hear my confession, let him make himself comfortable for a long duration.’ Berna opened the book and placed her finger on the page. ‘Listen how perfectly the Romance descrives him: “Il m’a au coeur cinq plaies faites.” Love has pierced him with five golden arrows: Simplicity, Courtesy, Company, Beau-Semblant and Beauty.’

      ‘Your beauty?’

      ‘Pogge, you ne understand allegory, just listen. In being pierced with these five arrows, love has crippled him.’

      ‘Certainly it is a great inconvenience to a man going about his affairs to have five arrows sticking out of him.’

      ‘Shhh! No more interruptions. He is crippled by love, he is love’s vassal. When he was here, in Outen Green, he told me even were his will otherwise, he couldn’t but love me par amour. He’s all that love demands: courteous, free of pride, elegant, light-hearted and generous. Yet he suffers terribly from the pain of those five wounds. How he suffers, most of all when we parted, try to conceal it as he might. Five wounds, Pogge!’ Berna touched in turn the palms of her hands, her feet, and one of her ribs. ‘Cinq plaies! Pogge, you ne know what it’s like to love and be loved. Believe me when I tell you that to see his face when he regarded me for the last time at the moment of his departure was like seeing the very face of Christ on the cross.’

      Pogge wrinkled her nose. ‘I ne think it proper to know Christ’s love in a sense romantic.’

      Berna leaned forward, took Pogge’s hands in hers and pressed them tightly. ‘Might you joy the sentiment of true love, as I have, you see it like to a sphere with many aspects.’

      Pogge squealed, leapt to her feet and backed up against one fork of the tree roots. The glistening snout, pointed tusks, stiff bristles and small black eyes of an enormous boar depended of the top of the root opposite. Over his ears hung a garland of mallow-flowers and from his half-open mouth fell threads of silver slime.

      Berna got up and scratched the boar on the cheek. ‘Enker,’ she said, ‘you frightened my cousin.’ The boar narrowed its eyes and snorted.

      Hab the pigboy appeared beside Enker and bowed his head to Berna and Pogge. Berna commanded him to keep the swine at a greater distance, and Hab bowed again, and answered, and they spoke for a time.

      He was a meagre brown youth in a patched tunic of undyed linen, barelegged, with shining black hair down to his shoulders, large black eyes and full red lips that gleamed as if he’d raised them from the surface of a spring. He spoke a word to Enker, the boar wheeled and they disappeared. There was a clatter as the herd moved off.

      ‘I lack your courage,’ said Pogge in a trembling voice.

      ‘I knew Enker as a piglet. They’re gentle beasts,’ said Berna, sitting down, ‘and cleaner than you suppose.’

      ‘The city pigs are nastier,’ said Pogge. She stayed on her feet and crossed her arms. ‘I can’t understand your villains. What did the pigboy say?’

      ‘It’s Cotswold,’ said Berna. ‘It’s Outen Green. As if no French never touched their tongues. I ne know myself sometimes what they mean. They say steven in place of voice, and shrift and housel for confession and absolution, and bead for prayer. He said he hoped they’d catch the thief who stole my marriage gown.’

      ‘It’s marvellous that your villains have such familiarity with the privy troubles of their lord’s family.’

      ‘It’s not so very privy no more,’ said Berna. ‘After the gown was stolen my father looked to recover the expense of replacing it by raising their amercements. Well, one of them must have taken it, and they might easily have saved themselves the trouble by informing us as to the person of the thief. We must go. If anyone from the house sees us in the forest sans guardian we’ll be punished.’ But she ne moved to part, and ran her finger over the painture of the Lover in Le Roman de la Rose.

      ‘And punished again for taking your father’s book,’ said Pogge.

      ‘He knows I read it.’

      Pogge knelt down close to her cousin. ‘The Lover is a man,’ she whispered. ‘It’s a book to guide men. If the Lover is a man, what are you?’

      ‘So you’ve read it,’ said Berna. ‘And you’ll know the response.’

      ‘I suppose you are Beauty and Simplicity and all the other arrows that have pierced him.’

      ‘It’s Love, not I, who shot those arrows.’

      ‘This was his sole desire,’ said Pogge. She took the rose and held it in her palm. ‘You refused it him, and he departed.’

      Berna’s face turned crimson and she stood. She picked up the book and the blanket with impatient gestures, seized the rose from Pogge’s hand and threw it away. She began to walk towards the village, and Pogge hurried after her.

      ON THE LEAVINGS of housewives’ stockpots the children laid owl pans and rotten crow, rib of vole and otter, a deal of brock rigbone, some small-fowl carrion and the shells of things that crawl in mould. All it ne gladdened us the pans of nightingales webbed with rat leg and snake rib in one mound of bone, Nack the hayward said a bonefire cleansed the air like no other, and held the saints their noses, their ears were open yet to beads, their gold eyes open to our candles’ light.

      RELATIONS BETWEEN THE abbot and the prior having degenerated so severely (the abbot now completely separated from administrative matters), the prior has assumed responsibility for the emergency. He is content to have me here as a distraction, until he remembers I have no capacity for music, and is dissatisfied. He suspects horror of the plague, rather than, as I insist, practical obstacles, postpones my exit.

      ‘I RECOGNISE YOU from the book,’ said Berna. ‘You’re she who imprisons Warm Welcome and the Rose together in a high tower that the Lover ne approach.’

      ‘Jealousy?’ said Pogge. ‘I’m not Jealousy. If I’m in the book it’s as you say, as Reason.’

      She looked over her shoulder at the pigboy Hab, who hadn’t moved away with the swine, but remained sufficiently close to the tree roots to hear what the cousins said. He caught her eye, laughed, winked, clapped his hands together, dropped his head back and let a squeal. The swine trotted to him.

      ‘Reason,’ said Berna, ‘is merely Jealousy in disguise.’