London (67 page)

1361

It was spring, and the sign of the Zodiac was Taurus, the Bull. For the previous two evenings, the planet Venus had risen over the horizon, glowing with love.

There had been a shower earlier that morning, but now a moist breeze from the south was driving the puffy clouds across a pale blue sky; over the river, London was glistening in the warm sun, and steam was coming up from the ground as two men stood at the southern end of London Bridge and looked at the baby.

It was propped up in a sitting position against an empty barrel beside the busy road. It appeared to have been fed, and wrapped in a white shawl which was still fairly clean. The baby seemed to be contented, but there was no sign of any parents.

“Abandoned, do you think?” the younger man asked. He was not yet twenty, but already his dark brown beard was dividing into a fork. He had a broad, intelligent face and eyes which seemed to take in everything. His companion nodded. Whoever had placed the infant there was probably hoping some passer-by would take pity. “How old would you say?”

“About three months,” Bull replied.

“He’s looking at you, Gilbert.” There was something about the little baby, even now, that suggested he was a boy; and certainly, he was gazing at Bull’s burly figure with interest. “It’s a pity to leave him,” the younger man continued. Unwanted babies sometimes ended in the river.

Bull sighed. He had a large house. He could certainly afford to take the child in. “I’d save him,” he said, “but the risk . . .” There was no need to finish the sentence. They both understood.

The baby might mean death.

The dark memory. Thirteen years had passed since it first arrived. The astronomers had warned of a terrible calamity, but had not been heeded.

The year before, the harvests had been bad and many poor folk in London had gone hungry. Winter had been harsh. And then the rain had come. Rain for days on end. Rain enough to make the Thames overflow and climb halfway to Ludgate; rain in rivers down the slope of Cornhill, and in streams along the gutters in the West Cheap; rain washing over the runnels as it poured down the lanes and turned the alleys into pools of black mud; rain filling cellars with slime whose smell came up, pungent through floorboards; rain in undercrofts drowning rats. The rain seeped down into the very roots of the city. But no city, not even London, could contain so much moisture, and when at last it ended, the old place could only sweat with the evil accumulation, and exude, under a yellowish sun, a ghastly, damp, unhealthy breath.

And then, at the start of that summer of 1348, came the plague.

It had already devastated much of Europe, and it travelled with astonishing speed. The Black Death had swept up the island of Britain and killed, perhaps, a third of the population. When it struck, it was sudden. Terrible sores and swellings appeared; fever followed, choked lungs and usually, within a few days, an agonizing death. The Great Mortality, it was called.

For Gilbert it was the dark memory. The day it reached London, he had left for Bocton and there he remained for a month with his family. Upon his father’s orders, the estate on its ridge had been virtually sealed off. The occupants of the manor and its hamlet did not leave, nor did any visitors come. Together, gazing over the great panorama of the Weald of Kent, they had waited. And by the Grace of God, the plague had passed them by.

When he did return, he found the world had changed. In the countryside, the Black Death had made labour so scarce that, with landlords competing for men to work the land, the old system of tied serfs had already broken down, never to recover. In the cities, whole streets of houses and tenements were empty. And something else had happened. A girl he had loved had gone with all her family. No one could even tell him where they were buried.

Despite the trauma, the city recovered with astonishing speed. Nothing could stop the trade of London. Fresh immigrants came in. The children of the survivors began to fill the yawning gap. Life seemed to have returned to normal. But the plague had not passed. It had only gone into hiding. For more than three centuries, like some terrible blight, it would suddenly appear and shatter the bright life of the city for a season before abruptly vanishing once more. Though where and how it dwelt meanwhile – whether in some dark, infected part of the city’s bowels, or brought back by the damp wind in a cloud – no man knew. In that spring of 1361, it had appeared again. Several London parishes had suffered. There had been many deaths in Southwark. And if this baby had been abandoned, the chances were that its family had died of plague. Bull was reluctant to touch it.

“There haven’t been any new cases for a week,” his friend remarked. “If this baby were infected, he would have died by now. I’d take him myself, except that I’m a bachelor.” But still Bull did not step forward.

They had not noticed the cart approaching, nor the puddle of water close by. As the cart passed by, it splashed them. The younger man leaped to one side with agility, but Bull was less fortunate, and a moment later was gazing down at his mud-splattered red cloak, his face a picture of woe.

And then the baby laughed.

The two men stared in surprise; but there was no mistaking it. The little round face was looking up at Bull with obvious amusement. “What a cheerful little fellow,” the younger man said. “Do let’s save him, Gilbert.” And so Bull picked the baby up.

A few minutes later, as the two men parted in the middle of London Bridge, Gilbert Bull gazed at the little bundle he was holding in his arms. “Now see what that damned fellow had made me do,” he murmured with a smile. He had known his young friend for some years now: he had a junior position in the king’s service, though his father and grandfather had dealt in wine. Before that, however, Bull assumed that the family must have been shoemakers, since their name came from the French word for shoes,
chaussures
. He was very fond of young Geoffrey Chaucer.

“Your name is Ducket. Ours is Bull.” It was the first sentence he remembered being addressed to him. How large and impressive the merchant had seemed as he spoke the words, not unkindly, but firmly. Until that moment, the little boy had vaguely supposed that he was part of the family. Now he understood that he was not. It had been the day their daughter was born, when he was five.

Yet who exactly was he? It was kindly young Chaucer who had discovered the baby’s identity a few days after he was found. “I asked around,” he told Bull, “and it seems the neighbours found him in a tenement where a poor family called Ducket had all died of plague. A miracle he lived, really. They left him by the bridge to be picked up, just as we thought.” More puzzling had been the baby’s first name. Since no child could enter heaven unbaptized, and since infant mortality was high, babies were usually christened quickly after birth. “I asked at all the local churches,” Chaucer reported. “But not a thing.” And when they wondered what to do, he grinned. “Call him Geoffrey,” he said. “I’ll be his godfather.”

When he was three – this was the custom – the boy had been confirmed into the Church. After that, he had not seen much of his godfather for some years, since Chaucer was often away. Yet even if he was only a foundling, without a real family, his childhood was happy. Bull was always scrupulously fair and his wife, in her quiet way, was prepared to act as a somewhat distant mother. Indeed, only one thing worried him.

He was odd. There was a funny white patch in his hair which people stared at. Worse, the curious webbing of skin between his fingers appeared to be strange as well. Often, he would look surreptitiously at people’s hands to see if they had this webbing too. But they never had. Once he had discovered that the cook’s assistant, a fat girl who seldom spoke, was also called Ducket, and he had asked her eagerly, “Are you of my family?” But she had only munched a ginger cake and finally told him: “I dunno.”

Gilbert Bull’s house stood near the middle of London Bridge on the upstream side. It was four storeys high with a tall, steep tiled roof. It was constructed of timber and plaster and, like many of the better houses now, its dark oak beams were elaborately carved. A dozen curious little gargoyles of human or animal faces peeped down cheerfully from overhanging corners into the busy street. The ground floor contained a counting house. On the main upper floor, a splendid solar, a living room with a large fireplace and chimney looked out over the river. The top half of its big window was filled with tiny panes of greenish glass. Coal burned in the fireplace. Known as sea coal since it was brought from the north by ship, it gave more heat and smoked less than timber. Above this floor were bedroom chambers, and above those, the attics. The cook slept in the kitchen on the ground floor; little Geoffrey Ducket, the servants and the apprentices, in the attic.

But the busy kitchen was his favourite place; the great spit by the fire which was always lit; the blackened old iron kettle; the huge wooden vat of water, filled from a bucket lowered into the sparkling Thames each morning; the leather tank of live fish from which the cook would make her selection; the heavy pot of honey she used for sweetening; the pickling tub and the spice cupboard where he would go to open the jars and sniff the aromas.

Still more amusing, once a month, was to watch the women do the laundry. A big wooden trough was placed in the middle of the kitchen floor, filled with hot water, caustic soda and wood ashes, and linen shirts and sheets were soaked, pounded, rinsed and then run again and again through a mangle until they were stiff as a board. The cook showed him how to clean fur as well. “This is the fluid I use,” she explained. “I take wine, and fuller’s earth.” She used to let him sniff this and he would start and jerk back his head at the pungent smell of ammonia. “Then I mix in some juice from green grapes. And, you see, every stain comes out.”

He would hang about by the kitchen doorway to watch the pedlars coming by with their wares just after the service of terce in the morning. And for special amusement, from the little courtyard where they lowered the bucket into the river, he would throw sticks down into the Thames and then rush dangerously across the crowded thoroughfare and into another yard where he would try to see them as they came shooting out under the arch on the other side.

But the best times of all were spent with his hero.

There were usually apprentices in the house, friendly, but too busy to take much notice of the little foundling in the kitchen. Except for one. A decade older than Ducket, with curly brown hair, brown eyes, a devil-may-care attitude coupled with a kindly charm, to the boy he seemed a god. The younger son of a rich old gentry family from the West Country, his father had sent him to join the merchant élite of London. As the cook would say with approval: “That’s a real young gentleman.” But Richard Whittington was still an apprentice. In the old days, rich men or the sons of citizens bought or inherited their citizenship. Now they almost always obtained it through the guilds. They had always set the standards, quality, working conditions and prices, trade by trade. No craftsman or merchant could operate without guild membership. But nowadays the guilds dominated the wards, the common council and the inner council of aldermen. From the humblest craft guilds to the great merchant guilds like the Mercers who vied with each other for control of the city’s politics, the guilds were London.

Whittington liked little Ducket. The foundling had such a cheerful spirit that the apprentice often played with him. He taught him to wrestle and box and soon discovered something else: “no matter how often he goes down, he gets back up again,” he said approvingly. “He never gives up.”

Sometimes he would show him the city. The plague might have made gashes in the population, but London still seemed to be bursting with life. And everything was such a wonderful jumble. They would dive into an alley and find some great nobleman’s house, with his coat-of-arms fluttering on a silken banner from the windows, while to left and right clustered the hanging wooden signs of bakers, glove-makers and taverns. Even the house of the Black Prince himself was in a street full of fishmongers, and great wicker baskets of herbs hung by his gate, to lessen the smell. Rich, middling and poor jostled side by side; so did the sacred and the profane. The great walled enclosure of St Paul’s might set the cathedral apart; but by the little church of St Lawrence Silversleeves, the surrounding tenements, which had been emptied by the Black Death, had collapsed and their yard had been turned into a midden where poor folk went to relieve themselves – and whose resulting stench obliged the curate to keep a handkerchief before his face as he hurried through the services.

Once they made a longer expedition. This was to find the origin of the city’s fresh water supply.

Since the tidal Thames was often salty, it was not always good for drinking. Once, the Londoners had used the little Walbrook or the nearby Fleet; but neither of these was wholesome. Apart from the discarded pelts from the skinners’ workshops, there were too many houses with
garderobes
hanging over its narrow stream to make the Walbrook pleasant; as for the Fleet, it was a dirty river now. Upstream lay the tanneries where leather was cured and whose effluent made the Fleet stink of urine and ammonia. Then, by Seacoal Lane, the coal barges unloaded, and their dust darkened the water. At Newgate, butchers from the shambles would come out and empty offal and entrails into the stream. By the time the Fleet passed the watermill which stood at its junction with the Thames, it was not a pretty sight.

So in the middle of the West Cheap stood a curious building, shaped like a miniature castle tower; from its sides, through narrow pipes of lead, came constant streams of clear fresh water, brought there by a little aqueduct. It was known as the Great Conduit. Whittington and the boy followed the line of the pipes one Sunday afternoon all the way across to the sparkling spring which fed it, on a slope just north of Westminster, two miles away.

But if, to the boy, these were marvels, they did not seem to satisfy his hero at all.