Belle's Song (25 page)

“You’re going nowhere, squire. If you want to see her
again, you’ll need to come to Westminster Hall. That’s where treason trials take place.”

“Belle! Belle!”

The door was slammed in Walter’s face.

The summoner neither touched me nor spoke to me as I was hurried along damp corridors. At last we came to a line of cells, most of which were empty, though the smell told me they had recently been full. A fat-legged, sunken-cheeked woman was sitting on a stool right at the end of the line, supping from a tankard. When she saw the summoner, she wiped her mouth on her hand and, with some difficulty, got up. The summoner gestured with his head and she opened one of the wooden doors. I walked swiftly inside. I didn’t want to be pushed. “Father?” It was empty. The summoner filled the doorway. “Give me my book and I’ll put you in with your father,” he said.

I shook my head.

“Tell me where it is, and once I’ve fetched it, I’ll let your father go.”

I shook my head again. Without the book I had no weapon at all. “I couldn’t give you the book even if I wanted to,” I said. “We saw Master Chaucer’s name in it, so we destroyed it. Please. Leave my father be.”

The summoner froze. “Destroyed it? All that work! God’s work! Gone?” He could scarcely absorb the enormity of his loss. “I make few mistakes,” he said,
cracking his knuckles, “but I made a mistake with you. I thought you cared for your father. I thought you were loyal to England. No matter. You see, you think you’ve been clever.” He came very close. “The truth is, when bumptious girls like you take on somebody like me, they never win.” Those eyes raked me up and down, lingering where men’s eyes linger. He was tempted to take a very personal revenge. Sweat prickled my back. He touched my breast with the flat of his hand. The woman jailer coughed. His hand turned into a fist and I thought he was going to hit me. Instead, with a wily twist, he jerked Poppet away. I screamed. “Give her back! Give her back!” He dangled her by one leg upside down. I couldn’t bear it. “Give her to me!”

“People who play at politics can’t play with dolls.” He twirled Poppet around. She looked so helpless. I lurched forward and tried to rescue her. “What a poppet it is,” he said, and, with a ghastly smile, lumbered backward, bidding the woman lock the door behind him.

I tried everything with that woman: kicking and shouting; bribery (though I had nothing with which to bribe her); praying softly as though I were a saint; crying; pretending I was ill; declaring I was dying; threats and pleading, sometimes on my knees. I begged for news of my father. I begged for Poppet back. In the end, there was nothing to do but curse God that
I’d ever got involved with a pilgrimage that had led to this disaster.

I was not ill-treated. Food and water were passed through a flap and the small bucket left in the cell for my waste was removed three times a day. Though the cell was windowless, I always had a candle. Three blankets were left so I wasn’t cold. Nor did the summoner come back to taunt me, though since I didn’t know he wasn’t returning, I hardly dared sleep.

Yet it was awful. It wasn’t just that I was terrified for my father. It wasn’t just that I missed the physical warmth of Walter or the comfort of Poppet. It wasn’t even that I thought the summoner would find the book, or that, despite our efforts, London would not rise for the king, though both those things were likely. The worst was that as the days dragged on, everything became unreal in the extraordinary silence of the place. There was literally nothing to see, nothing to hear, nothing to do. Nothing dripped. Nothing rustled. Nothing sighed. The woman didn’t sit outside my cell. She came and went and I couldn’t even count her footsteps because I never heard them. It was like being buried alive. After the first two days, I tried to fire my imagination. I closed my eyes and was in a cloud, whirling through time. I held the candle close and was a fire-breathing witch. I even stood straight, arms by my sides, and tried to be Excalibur again. That, surely,
would at least provoke guilt-ridden remembrance. But I remained only me, in this place, with nothing. After a while, the urge to count in threes became almost overwhelming, even though there was nothing to count. I fought against it. If I started to count, I’d never stop.

Sometime during what I think was the fourth night, I unwrapped my legs. I missed the salve but it had done its work. In the soft glow, you might have thought I’d just had some bad scrape, perhaps falling off a horse. A horse! I thought of Dulcie. And then I thought of Arondel and of Granada and then, by association, of Luke, who was never far from my thoughts anyway. I made myself breathe very slowly and deeply until I was dizzy, then, swaying and humming, tried to relive our dances. That worked until I crashed into the wall and fell, almost extinguishing the candle. I didn’t dance after that.

Only later did I learn that I was imprisoned for twenty-one days. If somebody had said a week or a year I’d have believed them, since I lost all sense of everything. Had I been left much longer, I expect my willpower would have crumbled and I would have started on the one, two, three; one, two, three. They’d have got a surprise, when they came for me, if I’d emerged jibbering. As it was, I learned something in that cell that I never forgot. Fear, hope, and despair can all be banished if you simply retreat so far into yourself that you no longer really exist. After I’d failed to turn myself into a cloud or a witch
or Excalibur, I turned myself into nothing. I was just a shell. Nothing could hurt me because there was nothing to hurt, and if there was nothing to hurt, there was no need to count. It was, in its way, a release.

It was not the summoner, but two smartly dressed upper servants who eventually unlocked the door and told me to follow them. They were armed and marched on either side of me. In the corridor, we met another man. He was carrying parchments: clearly a clerk. I asked no questions; nobody volunteered information. I gestured that I’d like to wash. That wasn’t allowed. We proceeded to the door through which I’d entered, and, squinting in the sudden sun, my world quickly darkened again as I was lifted bodily into a closed cart. I heard a peal of bells. It was a triple peal but somehow this didn’t reassure me. Indeed, after the silence it was loud enough to break my shell. Though I fought against them, feelings started to creep in. I could hear people talking when the cart stopped at crossroads and wondered if anybody was concerned for the wretch inside. Most would give the cart a cursory glance and forget it. That was the best policy until the cart came for you.

We traveled for about an hour. We didn’t cross the river. I would have heard the echo of the steel-rimmed wheels. I told myself that my father would be dead, Walter would have fled, and Master Chaucer would have disappeared.
Wherever we were going, there would just be me, and if there was just me, I could tie myself in a knot so tight that whatever the summoner did or said couldn’t hurt me. That was the only way to keep my fear contained.

When we halted, I was bundled into the closed courtyard of a grand palace with glass windows, thin as a cathedral’s. Westminster. I tightened the knot. Somebody was waiting, holding the salve bag in one hand and a purse stuffed with coins in the other. Walter! The clerk glanced inquiringly at the doorkeeper, who took the coin, slipped it under his tunic, and shrugged.

Walter ran to me, frowning at the guards until they moved away. He forced me to sit on the cart’s running board. His cheeks had lost their bloom but he was not gloomy. “I bribed my way down here. It wasn’t hard. I said you might die without the salve and they didn’t seem keen on that.” He opened the bag and took out the jar. His hands were shaking. “I’ve tried to get in every day to see you. They wouldn’t arrest me because my father begged them not to.” He swallowed his mortification and shook his head. “Never mind about that. You’re to be taken to the hall. Your father’s already in there. It’s a show trial, Belle, but you’ve got the book in your poppet.” I stared only at my legs. “There’s something else.” He put his hands on my shoulders. “Luke’s in there too.” He went back to my legs and rubbed the salve in hard. I couldn’t speak. “Yes,” Walter said.
He was the babbler now. “When the Master was sure the summoner had lost all interest in Luke, he went to St. Denys himself. He wrote a song and left it in the guesthouse. It was a rather naughty song about a spectacled youth who followed the Rule of St. Benedict so closely he dried up, like parchment. Of course it was found, just as Master Chaucer meant it to be, and the monks teased Luke mercilessly. Guess what happened next?” Walter answered for me. “That’s right. There was a fight, and then another and another, until the abbot told Luke to leave, and when Luke said that God would never forgive him if he broke his vow, the abbot said that God would never forgive
him
if he kept it. At least that’s how Master Chaucer tells it. So Luke was sent back to England. Master Chaucer never told Luke of course. Luke just thinks that somehow God intervened on his behalf, though he’s not sure exactly how. The Master’s a genius. I’d never have thought of such a trick.” He wiped his hands. As he pulled my skirt back over my ankles his expression became very dark. “Did that man hurt you, Belle?”

“I haven’t got Poppet.” I hadn’t used my voice for so long that it came out as a frog’s croak. Walter paled a little. “The summoner took her on the first day.”

“Oh lord.” Walter sat down heavily and put an arm around me.

“None of that.” The gatekeeper, anxious now, came
between us. “Get back to the hall. You’ve had your time.” The two servants pulled me to my feet. Walter tried to stand beside me but was forcibly prevented, so he had to follow behind as we went through the door and into the place where my fate would be decided.

16

So it befell that on a certain day
This summoner rode forth to catch his prey …

The corridor was of undecorated stone, but we soon climbed a set of steps into an enormous painted hall with four large chairs on a dais straight in front of me and wooden benches on either side. The first person I saw was my father, and my heart almost shot out of my chest. In all this mess, a miracle.
He was standing.
It would have taken more than two guards to hold me. I was away and in his arms before they realized I’d gone. He held me close. “Well, Belle,” he said into my hair, “so this is where your pilgrimage has led.”

I hugged him harder. He unpeeled my arms and regarded me, his beard quite gray and his face so drawn, yet so full of love and concern, that I just wanted to cry. I didn’t, though. I held his hands. “You’re standing.”

The ghost of a smile. “Yes. I’m not going to be tried for some unknown crime sitting down. Peter Joiner made me some calipers and brought them to me after my arrest. His wife stitched these trousers, to hide them. I want justice, not pity.”

“I didn’t mean this to happen.”

“No, Belle. You never mean anything to happen, not my accident, not the bread burning or the eggs going rotten. But happen things always do.” He gripped me. “None of that matters now. Just listen. I don’t know what any of this is about, but if there’s blame or condemnation, I’ll take it. Do you understand me? I forgive you everything, but I’ll not forgive you sacrificing yourself to save me. If I hang, it’ll only mean that I join your mother more quickly. I’ll welcome it.” My chin quivered. My father shook me. “Belle! Do you hear me?” I nodded. “And do you promise?”

“I can’t,” I began to sob. “I can’t promise that.”

“You’ve got to promise,” he said harshly. “If you don’t, you’re no daughter of mine.”

“Father!”

“Promise. Say, ‘I promise!’”

Why didn’t the guards drag me away right now, before I had to speak? They didn’t, so I said the words my father wanted to hear and his grim smile was no consolation, no consolation at all.

People filed in to sit on the side benches. There was hardly a crowd. My father and I were too unimportant for that. Walter, Master Chaucer, and Luke came in together. Behind his spectacles, Luke had two black eyes and his right cheek was purple. In the poor light from the sconces, he had an unworldly air about him,
as though he were just a mirage, like the clouds he had produced on the journey.

Alongside Luke, to my surprise, sat some of the other pilgrims: the prioress, Madam Medic, Dame Alison, Sir Knight, and even the skinny cleric. I couldn’t think why they’d come. On the opposite benches was a huddle of other people. I didn’t want to look at them. I imagined they’d come to crow. Last to arrive was Widow Chegwin, puffing. My father’s face was impassive.

The judges took their seats amid great fanfare: “My lords Gloucester, Warwick, Beauchamp, and Arundel,” called the clerk.

Master Summoner appeared as if from nowhere, along with a mousey man who identified himself to the judges as Archdeacon Dunmow. Silence fell. A clerk came forward and read out the charge against my father: that he, John Bellfounder, had consorted with treasonable men intent on the destruction of the realm; and that he had used his daughter, Belle Bellfounder, to send secret messages between King Richard and the King of France.

My father stiffened. The summoner never looked at him at all.

A gaggle of witnesses was called, only two of whom I recognized: the manciple in charge of buying provisions for the Inner Temple and the doctor who had attended my mother. The manciple was called first and made great show of reading out an account he’d written of a
treasonable exchange he’d overheard at the Tabard, which was strange, since he could neither read nor write. The doctor just repeated everything the summoner said, nodding his head all the while. After him, all the witnesses, most of whom were complete strangers, did likewise. After half an hour of this, the judges wearily asked if there were any witnesses to speak on the accused’s behalf. I leaped up and shouted, “Yes!” but my father pinned me with a glare of steel. “You promised,” he said coldly. “For once in your life, keep your word.” I sank down.