London (48 page)

He was a white-haired old man whom Mabel revered. The sermon alarmed her, and the next time she saw him she had begged him to explain: “Why are women more likely to sin, Father?”

The old man had smiled kindly. “It is in their nature, child. God has made woman the weaker vessel.” It was an old belief, dating back to St Paul himself. “It is man who is made in God’s image, my child. Man’s seed produces his perfect likeness. Woman, being only the container in which the seed matures, is therefore inferior. She may still reach heaven, but, being inferior, it is harder.”

Several days passed while Mabel digested this authoritative information. Certain things still puzzled her and so, afraid he might be angry and apologizing to him for her confusion, she once more approached the kindly old man and asked: “If man’s seed produces his perfect likeness, how is it that women are born as well as men?”

Far from being angry, the priest had placed his hand on her shoulder. “A very good question,” he told her. “You see, some of the seed is defective. But – and this is one of the wonders of God’s creation – it is necessarily so, to provide vessels by which mankind may continue. Is that all?”

“I also wondered, Father,” she continued humbly, “if a child is born of man’s seed only, why is it that children often resemble their mother and not just their father?”

To her relief he positively beamed. “God’s providence is wondrous indeed. Why, child, you think like a physician. The answer to your question is not certain but the great philosopher Aristotle” – he smiled at this evidence of his own learning – “was of the opinion that while it grows in the womb, the unborn child drinks fluid from the mother which may have some effect. So you may take it that this is the reason.”

“Tell me one last thing, Father,” she asked meekly. “If it is so hard for a woman to be saved, what must I do?”

Now the priest frowned, not because he was irritated, but because he did not know. “It is hard to say,” he replied at last. “Pray earnestly. Obey your husband in all things.” He paused. “There are those, my child, who say that it is only virgins who can easily pass into heaven. But that is not a path for all.”

From this kindly conversation, Mabel came to understand three things: that women were inferior; that she herself might have some talent for the arts of the physician; and that virginity was the likeliest path to heaven. Few of her contemporaries would have doubted the first or last of these statements.

It was not surprising, therefore, when, a few years later, realizing she had little chance of ever finding a husband, her earnest nature should have made her desire to enter the religious life. Here, however, she met a difficulty that might have been insuperable: “Our family are only fishmongers,” she acknowledged.

The decline of the Barnikel family from their glory in Viking days had been steady and probably inevitable. Since the Conquest, the old Danish families of London had lost their hold, pushed steadily aside by incoming merchants from Normandy and the growing network of German Hanseatic ports. The present Barnikel of Billingsgate was a fishmonger, meaning not that he sold fish in the street, though he did have a stall, but that he dealt in fish and other cargo for shipping. And though he was a prosperous and respectable fellow, albeit one given to occasional rages, he and his fellow fishmongers enjoyed a status about the same as the richer craftsmen and far below that of wholesale merchants like Bull and Silversleeves.

Yet why should this be such a problem? It was a commonplace of the time that by adulthood nature provided a greater supply of women than of men – about 10 per cent more in England at this date. By Mabel’s generation, this difference had been increased by the growing number of men entering holy orders and, at least in theory, a life of celibacy. It might have been expected, then, that many women would also choose the religious life.

But it was not so. True, there were the great nunneries, but they were few, select, and expensive to enter, the preserve of noble families and the richest merchants. And though the Catholic Church might be content to idealize a few pious noblewomen, given its view of women in general as weaker vessels there was little interest in expanding the female orders. As for the humble merchant and craftsman, the spare women of the household were absolutely necessary to his economy, working in the house and helping him at his trade.

Mabel, therefore, was too lowly born to serve God in any formal capacity.

But she was persistent. She heard of a nunnery that took lay sisters to perform menial tasks. Some of the crusading orders were even using women nurses. Finally, a place was found for her in the hospital attached to the rich priory of St Bartholomew. No donation was required.

And she was happy. She liked tending the sick. She knew every herbal cure, real or otherwise, that the hospital used, and was always on the lookout for more. In the larder she kept a veritable treasure-trove of jars, pots and boxes. “Dandelions to clean the blood,” she would explain, “cress for baldness, wort for fever, water lilies for dysentery.” For the truly sick, she would bring holy water from the rich canons regular in the priory, or she would help a struggling invalid across London to touch some holy relic that was, she knew, his only hope of a cure or, better yet, of eventual salvation.

And then there was Brother Michael. From the moment she had set eyes on him early that June, she had felt sure he was a saint of some kind. Why else should a rich merchant’s son desert Westminster Abbey not for the rich priory, but for her poor sister, the hospital? How she admired his quiet, stately ways, the fact that he read books and was wise.

Yet as one month passed, and then a second, she realized that not everyone shared her opinion of him. Some, like his wicked brother, even thought him a fool. This made her angry. “He’s just too good for them,” she would mutter. So that while she continued to revere him, she also began to feel protective.

But now Brother Michael was looking towards the city gate and waving.

“Here he is,” he remarked pleasantly, as Alderman Bull strode towards them.

The wickedest man in London was in a very bad temper indeed.

He would not have come there at all if it had not been for his mother. For weeks now she had been begging him, “Be reconciled with Michael before I die.” When he replied irritably that she was not dying, she would only answer: “You never know.” Finally, he had been able to stand it no longer.

Why did his mother always take Michael’s side? She had done so ever since his brother was born. Personally he had never thought so much of his younger brother. When he had gone into the monastery at Westminster, he had been contemptuous. But when he had left that June, his fury had known no bounds. “The donations we made,” he shouted, “completely wasted!” He had not spoken to Michael since.

But that was not the real reason why his mother had plagued him to see Michael. He knew the true cause very well.

It was Bocton. Despite the delay caused by the kiddles, his ship had completed her voyage successfully. Negotiations with Abraham had taken time, but tomorrow the agreement would be concluded. Which was exactly what so shocked his pious mother.

“Can’t you see it’s a crime?” she had protested. “You’ll be damned for all eternity.” And many in London would have agreed with her.

A crusader was a holy pilgrim, ready to suffer martyrdom in God’s righteous war. In the eyes of the Church, his crusade absolved him from his sins and gave him a place in paradise. Though the repossession of the estates of bankrupt crusading knights was one of the commonplaces of that century, many considered it a serious moral crime and sought laws to protect crusaders from their creditors.

“To take advantage of a crusader like that. And to do it with a heathen Jew!” She had thrown up her hands in despair.

And then, having had no success, she had secretly gone to see Michael.

At first it seemed to Brother Michael that things were going well.

Sampson Bull, whatever his faults, was a man of his word. He had promised to come and be reconciled. He would do his best. He had prepared himself for the ordeal and even forced a smile on to his face.

It was a long time since he had bothered to visit St Bartholomew’s, and as Michael escorted him round, he could not help admiring the place. The priory consisted of a large Norman church, cloisters, a refectory and richly furnished monastic buildings. Not only was the priory well endowed, but every August, at the feast of St Bartholomew, it held an important cloth fair at Smithfield, from which it enjoyed a handsome profit. The members of the community, known as canons regular, were a small but distinguished company who lived in pleasant comfort.

The church itself was a noble structure with a broad, high nave, massive pillars, Roman arches and barrel vaults. The more intimate choir was especially fine, with a two-tiered screen of rounded pillars and arches forming a semicircle at the eastern end behind the altar. As the early autumn light filtered softly into this mellow interior, even the red-faced alderman was affected by its atmosphere, a mixture of Norman strength and Oriental warmth that conjured up images and echoes of the Host, the chalice, and of knights on crusade to the Holy Land.

Yet even though he tried to be agreeable, Bull could not help it if certain things began to irritate him. Somehow the sight of his brother’s bare toes and the faint slapping sound of his sandals upon the flagstones annoyed him. And why did this Barnikel woman with her strangely squinting eye keep staring at him so malevolently? As they toured the cloister, he was already breathing heavily.

Then came the moment Bull dreaded: they entered the hospital.

St Bartholomew’s Hospital was quite separate from the priory. Its brothers and sisters were not canons regular but a much humbler order of folk. The main building, to which Brother Michael now cheerfully led them, was a long, undecorated, rather narrow dormitory like a cloister walk, with a simple little chapel at one end.

Like most hospitals at that time, Bartholomew’s had begun as a hospice, a place of rest for weary travellers and pilgrims. But that had soon changed and Brother Michael and Sister Mabel were proud of their collection – now numbering over fifty – of the sick and helpless. There were three blind men, half a dozen crippled to some degree, several senile old women. There were men with ague, women with boils, the ill and suffering of every kind. As was the custom of the age, they were placed two, three or even more to a bed. The alderman looked at them with horror.

“Are any of them lepers?” he asked. Only a month before, a leprous baker had been discovered selling bread in the city.

“Not yet.”

Bull shuddered. What was he doing here? And what was his own brother, who might at least have upheld the family honour in a prestigious monastery, doing in such a disgusting place?

It was as they came out into the sunshine that Brother Michael made his move. The alderman had to admit that he did it with grace. Taking him gently by the arm and leading him a few paces away from Mabel, he began quietly: “My dear brother,” he said with obvious sincerity, “I’m sure our mother plagued you, but it has still touched my heart to see you here. You must forgive me, therefore,” he smiled, “if now, for a moment, I try to save your immortal soul.”

Bull grinned ruefully. “You think I’ll go to hell?”

His brother paused. “Since you ask, yes.”

“You wouldn’t want Bocton back in the family?”

“It is family pride, my dear brother, that is blinding you to your sin.”

“Someone else will buy Bocton if I don’t.”

“That doesn’t make it right.”

They had turned round and were pacing back towards Mabel, whom they had both forgotten for a moment. It was then that Bull, with a sigh and a shake of his head, uttered the terrible words: “It’s all very well to lecture me, Brother Michael, but you’re wasting your time. I’m not afraid of damnation. The fact is, I don’t believe in God.”

Mabel gasped.

Yet it was not such a shocking statement. Even in that religious age there were plenty of men who had doubts. Two generations before, King William Rufus had made no secret of his hearty scepticism about the Church and all its religious claims. Thinkers and preachers still found it necessary to argue the case for God’s existence. In a way, Bull’s view that with their endowments, their special courts, and all the accretions of the centuries churches were nothing more than the creation of men was testament to a certain fearless, if brutal, honesty not so very different from his brother’s.

But not to Mabel. She knew Bull was avaricious; she knew he scorned his saintly brother; she knew he planned to rob a crusader with the help of a Jew. Here, now, was the final proof of his absolute wickedness.

It was, for Brother Michael, one of the charms of Mabel’s character that it had never in her life occurred to her not to say what was on her mind. But even he was a little startled when, fixing the burly alderman with her straight eye, she burst out: “You’re a very wicked man. You’ll go to hell with the Jews. You know that?” She wagged her finger, not afraid to admonish the Devil himself. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself. Why don’t you give money to the hospital instead of robbing pilgrims who are a lot better than you could ever hope to be?” And she stared at him so hard it seemed she expected him to give in.