Canterbury Tales fic: Renaissance
Oct. 16th, 2015 01:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
a_t_rainOK, so this has literally been sitting on my hard drive for years, so I figured it was high time I posted it, even though I'm still not sure the ending is much of an ending. Also, I feel like I should apologize to all medievalists ever for the title, but it stubbornly refused to be called anything else.
I note that there is a 500+-year tradition of Canterbury Tales fic, including fanboy self-insertion, pairing canon characters with OCs, and femmeslash, but I'm pretty sure this is the only Clerk / Wife of Bath's Niece fic, like, ever.
In which the Clerk loses a bet and gets offered a new job, and we find out what sort of mother Alison of Bath would make...
Renaissance
“This is Maidenhead,” said the Clerk, “and that is the road to Oxford, there to the north. I take my leave of you here. Safe travels, fellow-pilgrims, and if we never meet again on earth, may we meet in heaven.”
The Wife of Bath laughed. “Well, I wouldn’t know anything about Maidenhead; I haven’t had one since I was twelve years old. But do you not owe me a forfeit?”
“Forfeit?” said the Clerk (whose name was Stephen). He tried to remember what he had promised at supper on their first night in Canterbury. There had been a great deal of ale drunk. He did have a vague memory of striking a bargain with the Wife of Bath, to be paid if either of them were to win the storytelling contest – which had seemed like a harmless agreement at the time, since there seemed to be no chance that either of them would. The Host had plainly favored the Knight, who (in Stephen’s opinion) deserved to win on his own merit.
That was before the Miller and the Shipman had dunked the Host’s head in a bucket of water until he came up spluttering and agreed to new rules for the game: the winner was to be chosen by popular vote, and not by the Host’s fiat.
The Knight had, in fact, been the runner-up. In addition to the votes from his son and his yeoman, which were only to be expected, he had also won the acclaim of Stephen himself, the Host, the Friar, the Franklin, and the Prioress. The last had cast her vote rather reluctantly, as if she had really wanted to vote for herself.
The Miller actually had voted for himself. The Summoner voted for the Pardoner, and so did the Reeve, who said the tale had fairly given him chills. The Second Nun voted for the Parson’s Tale, but nobody else felt quite saintly enough to do this, not even the Parson’s own brother. The Parson politely abstained. The Monk voted for the Tale of Melibee. The Wife of Bath, to everyone’s surprise, voted for the Second Nun’s tale of St. Cecilia.
Everyone else, including the Knight, had voted for the Wife of Bath. Which meant she had fairly won the right to claim a forfeit of Stephen, and Stephen couldn’t for the life of him remember what the forfeit was.
Alison smiled. She always smiled a great deal, not bothering to hide the gaps in her teeth, but this time it seemed somehow predatory. “You’re coming home with me.”
Several of the other pilgrims hooted. Stephen blushed.
* * *
A few more days on the road brought them to Bath. The rest of the company had parted ways by then, last of all the Shipman, who was going even farther west, into Devonshire. The Wife of Bath hadn’t actually tried to do – well, anything – but Stephen felt ever more awkward and nervous in her company. He supposed that if she tried to drag him by force to the altar, he could always say no, but she was such an oddly ... persuasive woman.
“I’m to be a priest,” he had tried saying at one point.
“Of course you are,” said Alison complacently. “All Oxford clerks are meant to become priests, aren’t they? But somehow, most of them don’t. That’s been my experience, anyway.”
“Have you much experience?”
“Here and there,” said Alison. “Enough to know when a man doesn’t want to be a priest. You don’t, do you?”
And Stephen realized that he didn’t, and wondered how she had known something that he only half-acknowledged himself. It had seemed easy enough from year to year to delay taking holy orders – there was always so much more to learn, and he could get by on the money his kinsmen sent him from time to time. He had thought a Canterbury pilgrimage might put him in the proper frame of mind to finish his time at Oxford, sell his books, and settle at last in some quiet country parish where one scarcely met an educated man between one year and the next. Instead, it seemed to have opened up a different set of vistas altogether.
* * *
They stopped in front of a prosperous-looking house on the outskirts of Bath. “Welcome home,” said Alison with satisfaction, “and we’re just in time for dinner, too.”
Two strapping men came to the door to greet them. They were plainly not servants, for they embraced Alison and kissed her on the cheek. Stephen judged one of them to be around thirty, the other a few years older.
Had she brought him here to be part of a harem? A he-rem?
“Welcome home, Mother!” said one of the young men.
“Oh!” said Stephen aloud, before he could stop himself. “Er, I didn’t know you had children,” he explained. “You never mentioned them.”
“Well,” said Alison, “there are always more interesting things to talk about on a pilgrimage, though they’re fine children, if I do say it myself. This is my oldest son, Harry. And this is Jack.”
“Er, good day,” said Stephen.
“This is Stephen,” explained Alison to her sons. “He’s a clerk at Oxford. We met on the road to Canterbury. He’s come here to be – Ah, here she is!”
A small girl had entered the room. She was a fragile-looking child, fair-haired, with a timid but intelligent face.
“And this,” said Alison proudly, “is my little Jenny.”
“Good day, Jenny.”
“Jenny, have you not a word to say to Master Stephen? He’s come all this way to be your tutor.”
“Tutor?” said Stephen with some relief, though rather more bewilderment.
* * *
Left alone at last in his chamber – which was a pleasant one, well-furnished and equipped with a supply of good wax candles – Stephen began a letter to the master of his college at Oxford. I respectfully ask your leave not to return for this next term; I have taken a position with a wealthy widow of Bath, who seeks a tutor for her youngest child...
When you put it like that, the situation seemed almost normal. If you had never met Alison, and if you didn’t bother to mention that the child was a girl.
“No more tales of patient Griselda,” Alison had said. “I won’t have her taught that. And no Valery and Theophraste, either.”
“As you will,” said Stephen, bemused.
“I don’t know why she wishes to fill her head with books – there’s little enough in them worth learning, if you ask me – but she does. She takes after her father, that one, God bring his soul to bliss.”
Jenny was the daughter of Janekin of Oxford, of course, named for her father. Harry and Jack, he had learned, were Alison’s children from two different husbands in her long-ago youth – or at any rate, the husbands had been willing to acknowledge them as theirs. Alison had no children from her fourth husband, although their marriage had lasted more than fifteen years. There had been something wrong with his seed, she explained without embarrassment, although nothing at all the matter with his ability to perform his marital duties.
Jenny, it was plain to see, was her mother’s favorite, and if she wanted a tutor, she was to have one.
There was one more member of the household, not counting the servants: Alison’s niece Marie. She was a widow, dark-haired and buxom, and Stephen could see that she looked much as Alison must have looked twenty-five years ago. He determined to put this out of his mind. He did not need to set his thoughts on pretty widows.
* * *
Jenny, it soon became apparent, already knew her letters; her father had taught her before he died. She could even speak French, with an accent that would have put the Prioress to shame. Marie, whose mother had been a Frenchwoman, made a little money giving lessons to the girls of the town, and she had taught Jenny for free. Most people would have regarded this as more than enough learning for a woman, but Jenny had set her sights on grander things. Stephen bought a Latin grammar with the money Alison had advanced him, and sent a servant to Oxford to fetch his own books. In the meantime – for Jenny was tearing through the grammar-book at an alarming rate – he borrowed a Bible from Father Gregory in the parish church, promising to return it on Sundays. (He was a little astonished that he was allowed to do this, but Alison and Marie had gone with him, and had used certain feminine arts to fluster the elderly priest into compliance.)
In principio creavit Deus caelum et terram...
“In the beginning creates – created God heaven and earth...”
Alison was sitting in the corner, half-listening to the lesson – no doubt to make sure Stephen didn’t sneak Griselda into the Book of Genesis – but also busily spinning. Her hands, Stephen had noticed, were seldom idle.
Et creavit Deus hominem ad imaginem suam; ad imaginem Dei creavit illum; masculum et feminam creavit eos ...
“And God created man from his imagination –”
“In his image.”
“In the image of God he created him, male and female he created them –”
“Wait,” said Alison, who had not seemed to be paying them much heed. “Read that part again.”
Jenny read it again, less haltingly this time.
“Ha,” said Alison. “God created men and women in his image, do I have that right?”
“Well, yes – I suppose so – But in the next chapter it says –”
“Never mind the next chapter. This one comes first, doesn’t it? So God must have thought it was more important.”
Stephen had noticed that Alison had a retentive, though not always completely accurate, memory where scriptural matters were concerned. She was obviously filing this passage away for reference in future disputes. By the time she got done with it, he thought, she’d have God creating the woman first and then adding man as an afterthought, so that Eve would have somebody to boss around.
* * *
In due time Stephen’s books arrived from Oxford. He had missed them sorely; they were his dearest possessions, his pearls of great price. Volumes of cosmography and medicine and theology and law; Virgil and Ovid and Horace and Aristotle; and (a half-guilty pleasure), certain Italian poets of a more recent age.
Alison sniffed a little when the servants carried the packets of books into the house; but she showed no inclination to burn or tear them, and Stephen gradually ceased to be uneasy about leaving her alone with them. He was, of course, very careful to give her no provocation. He began Jenny’s education in the classics with a Latin translation of Aesop’s fables, which seemed safe. He skipped the one about Juno, Venus, and the hen, just to be sure.
But he had little enough time to spend with his books that summer. Alison was in the habit of declaring that Jenny and Stephen both looked too pale, and sending them out into the fields to pick berries. Marie generally accompanied them when she did not have a pupil with her, although Stephen could not imagine what pretext Alison had for sending her, for Marie certainly was not pale. She made him think of a flame, or a bird from some far-off land where birds were brighter than they were in England.
Harry and Jack did not go berrying with them. They were landowners, having inherited substantial estates from their respective fathers, and the summer months were busy times for them. They returned to their mother’s house at suppertime and ate hurriedly, talking of tenants and agriculture. They treated Alison with a sort of amused affection, as if she were a favorite older sister rather than their mother. Stephen had little in common with them, although they seemed pleasant enough. It was Marie who became his friend, almost before he had noticed it.
The strawberries ripened first, then the raspberries and blackberries, growing heavy on the vines, staining their fingers and lips red. The Pardoner, he remembered, had said something about souls gone a-blackberried, and Stephen began to understand what the phrase meant. Still he lingered under the sun with Jenny and Marie, telling himself that the summer days were short and ought not to be wasted. Certain lines of Horace were running through his head – nunc decet aut viridi nitidum caput impedire myrto / aut flore ... pallida mors aequo pulsat pede pauperum tabernas / regumque turres ... He murmured them aloud, without meaning to.
“What is that?” asked Jenny. “I cannot construe it. It is something about death, isn’t it? Say it again, more slowly.”
Stephen said it again. Marie dropped the last few berries into her basket and stood still, listening.
“Pale death – something – knocks with foot – the taverns of the poor –”
“With equal foot. And it would be better to say, the huts of the poor –”
“That makes more sense, for the poor have no money to spend in a tavern – And the towers of kings?”
“Very good, Jenny.”
“It is like the picture of the dance of death in the church, isn’t it?”
“Yes, just like that.” Better not to explain, he supposed, that Horace was a pagan poet; that his answer was not to pray and repent, but to rejoice in the short, glorious hour of life. She was only a child, and even scholars were supposed to read pagan poets selectively. Take what is wise and virtuous, and leave the rest.
Marie was still standing as if lost in a private world. The basket had dropped from her hand. Stephen noticed this, abruptly, and stooped to gather up the berries. She bent down, too, and their hands brushed. He felt himself suddenly aflame. He was too much in love with Horace, and with the world.
“I think –” He did not know, suddenly, what he thought. He caught at what was safest. “I think you are far enough along with your Latin to begin some poetry, Jenny. We’ll stay in tomorrow and read.”
* * *
That little poem of Catullus’s about the sparrow would be all right, he thought; and the one about his dead brother. And the one about the joys of travel in the spring – it was that lyric, he realized, and not any pious impulse that had set his feet on the road to Canterbury. There were many more that he certainly could not share with Jenny, but it did not matter, since he had no book and would have to copy the poems out from memory. There was no danger of her stumbling upon something inappropriate for a child of –
“How old is Jenny, anyhow?” he asked Alison.
She looked up from the blackberry tarts she was making. “Twelve come Michaelmas.”
Stephen was surprised; the girl did not look more than nine, although her understanding was remarkable for a child. “Why,” he said, “you were married at twelve.”
“Yes,” said Alison shortly, “but that is not what I would wish for her.”
“No,” Stephen agreed at once. “She is still very young.” No, he thought, it was more than that. He had been chidden often as a boy – and had learned, as a man, to chide himself – for having too wild and vivid an imagination; but he found that he could not imagine Jenny as a burgher’s wife, bearing children, managing a household. He tried to picture her as a nun, but that was not much better. What did one do with a daughter like that? Oxford had been his second home and his salvation, but Oxford was a place for men. Hiring a tutor, he supposed, had been as wise a decision as any that Alison could have made; but that did little more than buy Jenny a little time. What would become of her when she was older, and must marry or enter a convent?
Alison’s voice cut into his thoughts. “For your part, Stephen, what do you think of marriage?”
So, thought Stephen, this was it. He’d been expecting Alison to proposition him sooner or later, but somehow he’d also been expecting more subtlety, and wasn’t sure what to say to this direct assault. “I – I haven’t ever thought about it, really.”
“Well, if you do decide to think of it, you could look farther and do worse than Marie. You’ll need something to live on, and she has a bit of money that her husband left her, besides what she gets from her teaching. No children living, but she’s young enough for more. To my mind she’s exactly what you need – because you’re not the type framed for chastity, whatever you may think.”
“Is anybody the type framed for chastity?” asked Stephen, desperate to deflect the conversation from himself. He was already blushing hectically, and he wondered how on earth Marie had come into this conversation.
“St. Cecilia,” said Alison promptly.
“Outside of saints’ lives.”
“I mean, the woman who told us the tale of St. Cecilia. She never told us her name.”
That was probably true, Stephen realized. He had little trouble recalling the names of most of his fellow-pilgrims – Robin, Oswald, Eglantine, Huberd, Geoffrey – even after four months the casual mention of a name would call up the vivid memory of a face. But for the Second Nun he could summon up neither name nor face. He remembered a brown habit, and a gentle grey horse; he had a vague impression that she was young, or at least not yet old; nothing more. She had been, he thought, too self-effacing for anyone to remember her: virtually the opposite of Alison.
“You liked her story,” he said. “Why?”
“Did you dislike it?”
“It was a good story. It’s only – It didn’t seem to me to be the sort of tale you’d like, somehow.”
“I liked it because it was true.”
Stephen was surprised. He had grave doubts about the accuracy of the tale of St. Cecilia, although he supposed he would have to repress them if he ever took holy orders.
“True to her, I mean,” Alison explained. “It wouldn’t have shown well if I had told it. We’re not all made to be saints, and it would be an uncomfortable world to live in if we were, just as much as if we were all sinners. But she believed every word of it, and that is what matters.”
Stephen wondered if the tale of Griselda was true to him. He thought not. He remembered how often, when he was telling the story, he had found himself half-apologizing, explaining that Walter was not a man to be emulated. Perhaps that was why no one, in the end, had thought it the best of the tales, although the Host had praised it enthusiastically at the time.
Alison crimped the crust of the last tart, put the leftover berries into a bowl, and poured cream over them. She set the bowl before Stephen before she carried the tarts off to the bake-house. “Eat. You’re too thin. And do think on what I said about Marie.”
* * *
He did think about what she had said about Marie, although not quite in the way Alison had intended. She had said no children living. He remembered Marie’s sudden stillness in the blackberry patch, and the basket that had fallen from her hand while he and Jenny talked of death.
He remembered, and forgot again. He never saw her dressed in mourning. Alison dyed the cloth for the clothes they all wore, and Alison always chose bright reds and blues for Marie. And – she did not have the manner of a woman in mourning; she was too bright and brisk and quick of tongue. He was surprised, therefore, when she came to him one night while he was reading and asked, “You have studied theology, haven’t you?”
Stephen started, and put aside his book. “Yes.”
“Then you can resolve me in a question. When my husband and children died in the last plague, I prayed to God that I might die, too. Do you think that is a sin? Alison said that it was, but I do not see why, for I did not try to slay myself. I only prayed, and I dressed their bodies with my own hands and would not go from the house until they were buried, and yet I did not take the plague and die.”
“No,” he said. “No, I don’t think it is a sin.”
“I am glad to know it. You have been a great clerk at Oxford, and read all the doctors of the church, so you would know better than Alison.”
Stephen had, at that moment, no more notion of what the doctors of the church thought about the question than what the man in the moon thought about it. He had spoken from his own instincts; but, he decided, there was no need to tell Marie that. “How many children had you?”
“Two. A girl four years old, and a baby boy.”
Just like Griselda’s children, Stephen thought, and then had no idea why he kept thinking about Griselda. Someone or other had said once that Walter, in the story, was an allegory for God, and that the tale taught us to be patient in the face of adversity beyond our understanding, and to trust that God had a purpose. But then, Stephen wondered, why had he not simply told the story of Job, and left poor Griselda out of it? Well – he remembered Alison saying that clerks never had anything good to say of women, and he remembered wanting to prove her wrong, but he was beginning to feel that he had gone about it all the wrong way.
“I am sorry, Marie.”
“It is well. It was three years ago and more.”
“I am sorry, all the same.”
“Thank you.” Her slim hand rested on his shoulder for a moment, and he found himself desiring her again, which was wholly wrong when she had come to him in doubt and grief. He had never had women friends before, and he found it all very confusing. He picked up his book again when she had gone, but could not concentrate. It was, he decided, a good thing that women were not allowed in the Oxford colleges; and yet, he had no wish to return to Oxford now.
* * *
Autumn brought visitors to Bath: the Knight, who was coming to try the effect of the waters upon an old war injury; his son the Squire; and the little priest Sir John, who was now the chaplain in the Knight’s household. Madame Eglantine had been visibly unamused by his tale of Chaunticleer and Pertelote, so Stephen wasn’t surprised that he had sought out new employment. It was plain that he found the Knight’s service more congenial; the sly twinkle in his eye had ripened into open mirth.
“Father doesn’t really need a priest,” the Squire confided to Stephen, “he’s so holy himself that it would be superfluous. What he really needs is a jester, and Sir John’s just the right man for that.”
Alison had not permitted the travelers to put up at an inn, but had insisted on hosting them. In the evenings there was story-telling. The Squire finally finished his tale of Canacee; he found an eager audience, this time, in Jenny, who was of an age to be enchanted by magic rings and talking birds.
After the Squire had finished, he courteously invited his hostess’s daughter to tell the next tale. By now she had progressed far enough in her Latin to begin struggling through Virgil, and she told the tale of the fall of Troy and Aeneas’s flight with his son and aged father, ending with his wife’s death and the discovery of his destiny to found Rome. She told it well, for a child of her age, and with only a few inaccuracies. The company applauded her, but Father Gregory was looking sharply at Jenny, and then at Stephen.
There was nothing unfit in the fall of Troy, Stephen thought defensively, even if it was a pagan work. He had not yet decided what they would do when they came to Dido, but surely Jenny already knew something of such matters; she was, after all, Alison’s daughter, and about to turn twelve.
Then Father Gregory told the story of Abelard and Heloise, as Stephen tried to conceal his growing anger beneath a mask of scholarly meekness. He had assumed that the old parish priest was no very good scholar, and that this was why Alison had not made him Jenny’s tutor. He thought, listening, that Father Gregory had some ability with rhetoric, and was evidently more educated than Stephen had supposed. It was, however, clear that Father Gregory thought the tale had an application, and intended it to be a warning for both Stephen and Jenny. So he was scholarly enough to have taken charge of Jenny’s education, but did not approve. Stephen wondered, then, why Father Gregory had permitted them to borrow the Bible; he must have had some idea what they wanted it for.
Alison shot Father Gregory a look that Stephen could not quite read, and began a story of her own. “This is the tale of the good and wise lady Nenyve, who loved learning with all her heart, and wished to become a great scholar of magic. And so she traveled far and wide to study with the wizard Merlin, who knew more sorcery than any man alive. And yet she was sore afraid of him, for he was a devil’s son, and ...” Alison glanced meaningfully at Father Gregory, “... a lecherous old goat who always imagined others to be as lustful as he was. And evermore he sought by snares and wiles to have her maidenhead...”
When Alison had ended her tale by imprisoning Merlin in a tree – “and good riddance to him” – the Knight suggested to Sir John, “You might tell the story that you told us upon the road. That was a good tale, I thought, and worth hearing again.”
The little priest nodded, and embarked upon a fable of a fox, a wolf, and a lion, finding voices for his characters that kept his audience in fits of laughter. Stephen almost lost sight of the moral of the tale, which was a warning against backbiting or using foul words against another.
* * *
“I pray you,” said Alison, when the guests had all departed for their homes or gone to bed, “do not take too much notice of Father Gregory. He is a good man in his way, but he has very little power of invention, which causes him to suppose things that are not true.”
“Isn’t that a paradox?”
“Not really. Not when there are people in the world who do have invention, and can use it to do things that have not been done before. Besides,” Alison added, rather cryptically, “there have been times when he has been glad enough to make use of my powers of invention to supply his own ... lack.”
“Are you going to bed with him?” Stephen asked, suddenly illuminated.
“You don’t think he would have let me borrow a Bible out of the church for a few friendly words and a bolt of cloth, do you?”
Stephen was not sure what he had thought, but he supposed Alison was right; one did not walk out of the church with a Bible unless one had something very precious to offer as surety, and he supposed that from Father Gregory’s point of view, Alison’s body might seem sufficiently precious. She was younger than Father Gregory, after all, and Stephen supposed that in the course of five marriages she must have acquired certain ... skills. He found himself blushing.
“Do you think it shameful?”
“I ... ah ... For a priest, yes, I think it is shameful. He has made vows.”
“Vows that not one man in a hundred is framed by nature to keep,” said Alison, “but I am glad you do not think it shameful for me.”
“It would hardly be good manners to tell you if I did think so,” said Stephen, rallying a little, "and you are the one paying my wages."
Alison chuckled. “I told you that you ought not to be a priest. You would have to reprove me very sharply if you were a priest, even if you kept a mistress yourself. Especially if you kept a mistress yourself.”
“Does Father Gregory reprove other men?”
“Of course he does.”
“That is hypocrisy.”
“It is his duty. Would it be better for him to commit fornication and neglect his duty?”
They were disputing, Stephen realized suddenly. Not as scholars did in formal debates at Oxford, with a repertoire of well-worn arguments from the church fathers and the pagan philosophers, but as it sometimes happened in the taverns, where the abstract questions came to life and the arguments took lightning-swift twists. Alison would have been good at the game; she had a gift for making audacious and unexpected assertions that nonetheless held up, or at least forced her interlocutor into deeper and more treacherous waters before he gathered the wits to refute them. She would have held her own in the drinking contests, too. No matter; a woman of Alison’s age would have been welcome in a student tavern only in the capacity of a tapstress or bawd.
“If you admit that Father Gregory is doing wrong, don’t you bear some blame for leading him astray?”
“I did what I must do to put a Bible in my hands, and in my daughter’s hands. Is there any wrong in that?”
“Some would say that there is very great wrong in it, for it is dangerous when ignorant folk interpret the Bible according to their own will.”
Alison smiled. “And that is why I am taking care that Jenny should not be ignorant. When you have taught her what you know, she can correct me.”
* * *
On the following evening, the storytelling continued. The Knight told them of King Richard the Lionheart and the noble pagan Saladin; Harry countered with a merry tale of Robin Hood; and Jack, cheerfully heedless of the fact that there were two priests present, told them about two of his tenants who had swapped wives for a week.
It came to Stephen, suddenly, that the Knight had said nothing at all about certain matters one would expect to hear of in the tale of Richard and Saladin. He doesn’t believe in God, Stephen realized, or at any rate, he isn’t certain that our God is the true one and the Mohammedans’ God is false. And yet, he is a good man. He didn’t know what to think about this.
Then it was Marie’s turn, and she told a tale of a poor young scholar who could speak in many sorts of poetry, and who so impressed the gods Pluto and Proserpina with his learning that they allowed him to wander at will in the realms of the dead. He found one living woman there, lost on her way back to the realms of the living, and offered to be her guide; but as they stumbled back into the sunlight, he found himself unable to speak of his love for her.
“And I pray you, resolve me this,” said Marie, “whether the lady ought not to be the wooer, if the man will not or dares not?”
Ending a tale with a question regarding love was always a good way to spark conversation; while the guests debated amongst themselves, Stephen turned to Marie and asked, in an undertone, “That is a strange tale. Where did you find it? It is something like the old tale of Sir Orfeo, and something like the Divina Commedia – but not very much like either. Is it French?”
“I found it in my own mind,” said Marie, smiling. “Perhaps it is not a good tale, but it is mine.”
He blushed. “No – I thought it good. I was only – curious.”
“Will you not tell us your tale, Stephen?” asked Marie, pitching her voice a little louder so the others would fall silent. “Don’t be shy; you’re among friendly company.”
The blood was pounding in his temples, so that he could hardly hear his own voice. “The tales I would tell have not been written yet.”
She smiled at him again. “Then you must write them.”
* * *
He hired a horse and set out for Oxford early the next morning, leaving a note lest Alison should suspect him of deserting them, although in point of fact he was not sure whether he intended to return. He took all the money he had earned, but left his books; he could always send for them later.
He kept thinking of Father Gregory and that damned story of Abelard and Heloise. The old priest had entirely mistaken the object of Stephen’s interest, but he had not been wrong about certain other matters. He had described Abelard as musing that there could be no accord between writing-desks and cradles, books and distaffs, pens and spindles; that one could not remain intent upon thoughts of philosophy amid the screams of children – unless one were rich.
Weren’t he and Marie better as they were, single and unencumbered, free to teach their respective pupils? And didn’t he belong at Oxford? He had tarried in Bath too long already.
* * *
Three days brought him to Oxford; he occupied most of the fourth in calling on old masters and old friends, a few too many of whom seemed to have gone away in the long months of his absence. After that he was not sure how to occupy his time. He went to a favorite tavern, where he recognized no one and spoke to no one but the boy who served him. At least the food and the ale were as good as he remembered, and almost as cheap. What then? He ought to have brought his books so that he could resume his studies at once; Oxford was no place for the idle.
On the following day, he went to a little shop that sold secondhand books, and lingered long without anything in particular catching his fancy.
“Have you anything in French?” he asked at last.
The book-seller showed him a new collection of ballades by a lady poet at the French court, a widow as it seemed. They were copied out in an elegant hand, and they spoke of love and grief; he thought Marie would like them very much.
“How much?”
“Five shillings.”
Nearly his full quarter’s wages. If he paid it over, the die would be cast; he must return to Bath, if only because he would have room and board there without paying any money down.
He paid.
* * *
He thought that, after all, he had been right to make that extravagant and frivolous purchase, and right to come back. Marie said, a little breathlessly, that she had never thought to own a book, and that she had not known there were such books, and that she loved the ballades. So did Jenny; she sat by the fire, reading them aloud in her high clear voice. So, surprisingly, did Alison.
“Well,” she said, with some satisfaction, when Marie had translated some of the poems into graceful English. “I always said that if women had written books, they would be worth hearing. I don’t know that I care for this ‘I am a widow clothed in black’ business though. Likely she’d feel better if she wore scarlet, and why shouldn’t she, I ask you?”
“Why not, indeed?” said Marie, flourishing the new gown Alison was making for her.
“Do you ... mean always to remain a widow?” Stephen tried.
Marie smiled, letting her dimples show. “Why, Stephen, I thought you’d never ask.”
* * *
They were married in the winter, and planned to leave for Oxford in the spring. There would be employment there, Stephen knew; young men needing to improve their Latin or Greek in a hurry, and likely there would be people who wanted to learn French as well. Now that it was impossible for him to make a career in the Church, he could not always be Alison’s dependent.
“You ought to take Jenny with you,” said Alison. “‘Tis time she learned how to manage a household of her own, and when your first babe comes, you’ll be glad of an extra pair of hands.”
“Will you not miss her?” Stephen asked.
“I can spare her for a year or two. Maybe I’ll come and visit her. I always was fond of a good-looking student.”
“Maybe Jenny will meet a student of her own,” said Marie slyly, in the way of brides who think everyone else ought to be a bride too.
“Maybe she will,” said Alison. “But no hurry.” She looked at Stephen and said, “Teach her well, and let her have ... as much time for learning as you can give her. A few years, at least. You understand?”
He thought once again of Griselda in the tale, of the way she had asked Walter not to treat his new bride as she had been treated, for the girl was of soft and tender breeding and would not be so apt to bear it as Griselda had been. “Alison?” he asked suddenly. “Where was your mother, when you were Jenny’s age?”
“Dead five years and more, by then,” said Alison, and then added, “She wasn’t yet thirty. I’m three-and-fifty and, God be thanked, I have my strength yet. But we know not the day nor the hour, as it says in the scripture, and I would she learned how to shift for herself in the world. Before she marries, not after.”
“Is Latin the way for a girl to learn to shift for herself in the world, do you think?” Stephen asked.
“Who knows what may be?” said Alison. “Do you think that lady-poet of yours knows Latin?”
“I expect she does. She writes like one who is lettered.”
“Well, there you are.”
Stephen tried to picture life in a household of lady-poets and wondered what it would be like. It was a thing, surely, that had not been done before. But Alison, he thought, was right: who knew what might be?
I note that there is a 500+-year tradition of Canterbury Tales fic, including fanboy self-insertion, pairing canon characters with OCs, and femmeslash, but I'm pretty sure this is the only Clerk / Wife of Bath's Niece fic, like, ever.
In which the Clerk loses a bet and gets offered a new job, and we find out what sort of mother Alison of Bath would make...
Renaissance
“This is Maidenhead,” said the Clerk, “and that is the road to Oxford, there to the north. I take my leave of you here. Safe travels, fellow-pilgrims, and if we never meet again on earth, may we meet in heaven.”
The Wife of Bath laughed. “Well, I wouldn’t know anything about Maidenhead; I haven’t had one since I was twelve years old. But do you not owe me a forfeit?”
“Forfeit?” said the Clerk (whose name was Stephen). He tried to remember what he had promised at supper on their first night in Canterbury. There had been a great deal of ale drunk. He did have a vague memory of striking a bargain with the Wife of Bath, to be paid if either of them were to win the storytelling contest – which had seemed like a harmless agreement at the time, since there seemed to be no chance that either of them would. The Host had plainly favored the Knight, who (in Stephen’s opinion) deserved to win on his own merit.
That was before the Miller and the Shipman had dunked the Host’s head in a bucket of water until he came up spluttering and agreed to new rules for the game: the winner was to be chosen by popular vote, and not by the Host’s fiat.
The Knight had, in fact, been the runner-up. In addition to the votes from his son and his yeoman, which were only to be expected, he had also won the acclaim of Stephen himself, the Host, the Friar, the Franklin, and the Prioress. The last had cast her vote rather reluctantly, as if she had really wanted to vote for herself.
The Miller actually had voted for himself. The Summoner voted for the Pardoner, and so did the Reeve, who said the tale had fairly given him chills. The Second Nun voted for the Parson’s Tale, but nobody else felt quite saintly enough to do this, not even the Parson’s own brother. The Parson politely abstained. The Monk voted for the Tale of Melibee. The Wife of Bath, to everyone’s surprise, voted for the Second Nun’s tale of St. Cecilia.
Everyone else, including the Knight, had voted for the Wife of Bath. Which meant she had fairly won the right to claim a forfeit of Stephen, and Stephen couldn’t for the life of him remember what the forfeit was.
Alison smiled. She always smiled a great deal, not bothering to hide the gaps in her teeth, but this time it seemed somehow predatory. “You’re coming home with me.”
Several of the other pilgrims hooted. Stephen blushed.
* * *
A few more days on the road brought them to Bath. The rest of the company had parted ways by then, last of all the Shipman, who was going even farther west, into Devonshire. The Wife of Bath hadn’t actually tried to do – well, anything – but Stephen felt ever more awkward and nervous in her company. He supposed that if she tried to drag him by force to the altar, he could always say no, but she was such an oddly ... persuasive woman.
“I’m to be a priest,” he had tried saying at one point.
“Of course you are,” said Alison complacently. “All Oxford clerks are meant to become priests, aren’t they? But somehow, most of them don’t. That’s been my experience, anyway.”
“Have you much experience?”
“Here and there,” said Alison. “Enough to know when a man doesn’t want to be a priest. You don’t, do you?”
And Stephen realized that he didn’t, and wondered how she had known something that he only half-acknowledged himself. It had seemed easy enough from year to year to delay taking holy orders – there was always so much more to learn, and he could get by on the money his kinsmen sent him from time to time. He had thought a Canterbury pilgrimage might put him in the proper frame of mind to finish his time at Oxford, sell his books, and settle at last in some quiet country parish where one scarcely met an educated man between one year and the next. Instead, it seemed to have opened up a different set of vistas altogether.
* * *
They stopped in front of a prosperous-looking house on the outskirts of Bath. “Welcome home,” said Alison with satisfaction, “and we’re just in time for dinner, too.”
Two strapping men came to the door to greet them. They were plainly not servants, for they embraced Alison and kissed her on the cheek. Stephen judged one of them to be around thirty, the other a few years older.
Had she brought him here to be part of a harem? A he-rem?
“Welcome home, Mother!” said one of the young men.
“Oh!” said Stephen aloud, before he could stop himself. “Er, I didn’t know you had children,” he explained. “You never mentioned them.”
“Well,” said Alison, “there are always more interesting things to talk about on a pilgrimage, though they’re fine children, if I do say it myself. This is my oldest son, Harry. And this is Jack.”
“Er, good day,” said Stephen.
“This is Stephen,” explained Alison to her sons. “He’s a clerk at Oxford. We met on the road to Canterbury. He’s come here to be – Ah, here she is!”
A small girl had entered the room. She was a fragile-looking child, fair-haired, with a timid but intelligent face.
“And this,” said Alison proudly, “is my little Jenny.”
“Good day, Jenny.”
“Jenny, have you not a word to say to Master Stephen? He’s come all this way to be your tutor.”
“Tutor?” said Stephen with some relief, though rather more bewilderment.
* * *
Left alone at last in his chamber – which was a pleasant one, well-furnished and equipped with a supply of good wax candles – Stephen began a letter to the master of his college at Oxford. I respectfully ask your leave not to return for this next term; I have taken a position with a wealthy widow of Bath, who seeks a tutor for her youngest child...
When you put it like that, the situation seemed almost normal. If you had never met Alison, and if you didn’t bother to mention that the child was a girl.
“No more tales of patient Griselda,” Alison had said. “I won’t have her taught that. And no Valery and Theophraste, either.”
“As you will,” said Stephen, bemused.
“I don’t know why she wishes to fill her head with books – there’s little enough in them worth learning, if you ask me – but she does. She takes after her father, that one, God bring his soul to bliss.”
Jenny was the daughter of Janekin of Oxford, of course, named for her father. Harry and Jack, he had learned, were Alison’s children from two different husbands in her long-ago youth – or at any rate, the husbands had been willing to acknowledge them as theirs. Alison had no children from her fourth husband, although their marriage had lasted more than fifteen years. There had been something wrong with his seed, she explained without embarrassment, although nothing at all the matter with his ability to perform his marital duties.
Jenny, it was plain to see, was her mother’s favorite, and if she wanted a tutor, she was to have one.
There was one more member of the household, not counting the servants: Alison’s niece Marie. She was a widow, dark-haired and buxom, and Stephen could see that she looked much as Alison must have looked twenty-five years ago. He determined to put this out of his mind. He did not need to set his thoughts on pretty widows.
* * *
Jenny, it soon became apparent, already knew her letters; her father had taught her before he died. She could even speak French, with an accent that would have put the Prioress to shame. Marie, whose mother had been a Frenchwoman, made a little money giving lessons to the girls of the town, and she had taught Jenny for free. Most people would have regarded this as more than enough learning for a woman, but Jenny had set her sights on grander things. Stephen bought a Latin grammar with the money Alison had advanced him, and sent a servant to Oxford to fetch his own books. In the meantime – for Jenny was tearing through the grammar-book at an alarming rate – he borrowed a Bible from Father Gregory in the parish church, promising to return it on Sundays. (He was a little astonished that he was allowed to do this, but Alison and Marie had gone with him, and had used certain feminine arts to fluster the elderly priest into compliance.)
In principio creavit Deus caelum et terram...
“In the beginning creates – created God heaven and earth...”
Alison was sitting in the corner, half-listening to the lesson – no doubt to make sure Stephen didn’t sneak Griselda into the Book of Genesis – but also busily spinning. Her hands, Stephen had noticed, were seldom idle.
Et creavit Deus hominem ad imaginem suam; ad imaginem Dei creavit illum; masculum et feminam creavit eos ...
“And God created man from his imagination –”
“In his image.”
“In the image of God he created him, male and female he created them –”
“Wait,” said Alison, who had not seemed to be paying them much heed. “Read that part again.”
Jenny read it again, less haltingly this time.
“Ha,” said Alison. “God created men and women in his image, do I have that right?”
“Well, yes – I suppose so – But in the next chapter it says –”
“Never mind the next chapter. This one comes first, doesn’t it? So God must have thought it was more important.”
Stephen had noticed that Alison had a retentive, though not always completely accurate, memory where scriptural matters were concerned. She was obviously filing this passage away for reference in future disputes. By the time she got done with it, he thought, she’d have God creating the woman first and then adding man as an afterthought, so that Eve would have somebody to boss around.
* * *
In due time Stephen’s books arrived from Oxford. He had missed them sorely; they were his dearest possessions, his pearls of great price. Volumes of cosmography and medicine and theology and law; Virgil and Ovid and Horace and Aristotle; and (a half-guilty pleasure), certain Italian poets of a more recent age.
Alison sniffed a little when the servants carried the packets of books into the house; but she showed no inclination to burn or tear them, and Stephen gradually ceased to be uneasy about leaving her alone with them. He was, of course, very careful to give her no provocation. He began Jenny’s education in the classics with a Latin translation of Aesop’s fables, which seemed safe. He skipped the one about Juno, Venus, and the hen, just to be sure.
But he had little enough time to spend with his books that summer. Alison was in the habit of declaring that Jenny and Stephen both looked too pale, and sending them out into the fields to pick berries. Marie generally accompanied them when she did not have a pupil with her, although Stephen could not imagine what pretext Alison had for sending her, for Marie certainly was not pale. She made him think of a flame, or a bird from some far-off land where birds were brighter than they were in England.
Harry and Jack did not go berrying with them. They were landowners, having inherited substantial estates from their respective fathers, and the summer months were busy times for them. They returned to their mother’s house at suppertime and ate hurriedly, talking of tenants and agriculture. They treated Alison with a sort of amused affection, as if she were a favorite older sister rather than their mother. Stephen had little in common with them, although they seemed pleasant enough. It was Marie who became his friend, almost before he had noticed it.
The strawberries ripened first, then the raspberries and blackberries, growing heavy on the vines, staining their fingers and lips red. The Pardoner, he remembered, had said something about souls gone a-blackberried, and Stephen began to understand what the phrase meant. Still he lingered under the sun with Jenny and Marie, telling himself that the summer days were short and ought not to be wasted. Certain lines of Horace were running through his head – nunc decet aut viridi nitidum caput impedire myrto / aut flore ... pallida mors aequo pulsat pede pauperum tabernas / regumque turres ... He murmured them aloud, without meaning to.
“What is that?” asked Jenny. “I cannot construe it. It is something about death, isn’t it? Say it again, more slowly.”
Stephen said it again. Marie dropped the last few berries into her basket and stood still, listening.
“Pale death – something – knocks with foot – the taverns of the poor –”
“With equal foot. And it would be better to say, the huts of the poor –”
“That makes more sense, for the poor have no money to spend in a tavern – And the towers of kings?”
“Very good, Jenny.”
“It is like the picture of the dance of death in the church, isn’t it?”
“Yes, just like that.” Better not to explain, he supposed, that Horace was a pagan poet; that his answer was not to pray and repent, but to rejoice in the short, glorious hour of life. She was only a child, and even scholars were supposed to read pagan poets selectively. Take what is wise and virtuous, and leave the rest.
Marie was still standing as if lost in a private world. The basket had dropped from her hand. Stephen noticed this, abruptly, and stooped to gather up the berries. She bent down, too, and their hands brushed. He felt himself suddenly aflame. He was too much in love with Horace, and with the world.
“I think –” He did not know, suddenly, what he thought. He caught at what was safest. “I think you are far enough along with your Latin to begin some poetry, Jenny. We’ll stay in tomorrow and read.”
* * *
That little poem of Catullus’s about the sparrow would be all right, he thought; and the one about his dead brother. And the one about the joys of travel in the spring – it was that lyric, he realized, and not any pious impulse that had set his feet on the road to Canterbury. There were many more that he certainly could not share with Jenny, but it did not matter, since he had no book and would have to copy the poems out from memory. There was no danger of her stumbling upon something inappropriate for a child of –
“How old is Jenny, anyhow?” he asked Alison.
She looked up from the blackberry tarts she was making. “Twelve come Michaelmas.”
Stephen was surprised; the girl did not look more than nine, although her understanding was remarkable for a child. “Why,” he said, “you were married at twelve.”
“Yes,” said Alison shortly, “but that is not what I would wish for her.”
“No,” Stephen agreed at once. “She is still very young.” No, he thought, it was more than that. He had been chidden often as a boy – and had learned, as a man, to chide himself – for having too wild and vivid an imagination; but he found that he could not imagine Jenny as a burgher’s wife, bearing children, managing a household. He tried to picture her as a nun, but that was not much better. What did one do with a daughter like that? Oxford had been his second home and his salvation, but Oxford was a place for men. Hiring a tutor, he supposed, had been as wise a decision as any that Alison could have made; but that did little more than buy Jenny a little time. What would become of her when she was older, and must marry or enter a convent?
Alison’s voice cut into his thoughts. “For your part, Stephen, what do you think of marriage?”
So, thought Stephen, this was it. He’d been expecting Alison to proposition him sooner or later, but somehow he’d also been expecting more subtlety, and wasn’t sure what to say to this direct assault. “I – I haven’t ever thought about it, really.”
“Well, if you do decide to think of it, you could look farther and do worse than Marie. You’ll need something to live on, and she has a bit of money that her husband left her, besides what she gets from her teaching. No children living, but she’s young enough for more. To my mind she’s exactly what you need – because you’re not the type framed for chastity, whatever you may think.”
“Is anybody the type framed for chastity?” asked Stephen, desperate to deflect the conversation from himself. He was already blushing hectically, and he wondered how on earth Marie had come into this conversation.
“St. Cecilia,” said Alison promptly.
“Outside of saints’ lives.”
“I mean, the woman who told us the tale of St. Cecilia. She never told us her name.”
That was probably true, Stephen realized. He had little trouble recalling the names of most of his fellow-pilgrims – Robin, Oswald, Eglantine, Huberd, Geoffrey – even after four months the casual mention of a name would call up the vivid memory of a face. But for the Second Nun he could summon up neither name nor face. He remembered a brown habit, and a gentle grey horse; he had a vague impression that she was young, or at least not yet old; nothing more. She had been, he thought, too self-effacing for anyone to remember her: virtually the opposite of Alison.
“You liked her story,” he said. “Why?”
“Did you dislike it?”
“It was a good story. It’s only – It didn’t seem to me to be the sort of tale you’d like, somehow.”
“I liked it because it was true.”
Stephen was surprised. He had grave doubts about the accuracy of the tale of St. Cecilia, although he supposed he would have to repress them if he ever took holy orders.
“True to her, I mean,” Alison explained. “It wouldn’t have shown well if I had told it. We’re not all made to be saints, and it would be an uncomfortable world to live in if we were, just as much as if we were all sinners. But she believed every word of it, and that is what matters.”
Stephen wondered if the tale of Griselda was true to him. He thought not. He remembered how often, when he was telling the story, he had found himself half-apologizing, explaining that Walter was not a man to be emulated. Perhaps that was why no one, in the end, had thought it the best of the tales, although the Host had praised it enthusiastically at the time.
Alison crimped the crust of the last tart, put the leftover berries into a bowl, and poured cream over them. She set the bowl before Stephen before she carried the tarts off to the bake-house. “Eat. You’re too thin. And do think on what I said about Marie.”
* * *
He did think about what she had said about Marie, although not quite in the way Alison had intended. She had said no children living. He remembered Marie’s sudden stillness in the blackberry patch, and the basket that had fallen from her hand while he and Jenny talked of death.
He remembered, and forgot again. He never saw her dressed in mourning. Alison dyed the cloth for the clothes they all wore, and Alison always chose bright reds and blues for Marie. And – she did not have the manner of a woman in mourning; she was too bright and brisk and quick of tongue. He was surprised, therefore, when she came to him one night while he was reading and asked, “You have studied theology, haven’t you?”
Stephen started, and put aside his book. “Yes.”
“Then you can resolve me in a question. When my husband and children died in the last plague, I prayed to God that I might die, too. Do you think that is a sin? Alison said that it was, but I do not see why, for I did not try to slay myself. I only prayed, and I dressed their bodies with my own hands and would not go from the house until they were buried, and yet I did not take the plague and die.”
“No,” he said. “No, I don’t think it is a sin.”
“I am glad to know it. You have been a great clerk at Oxford, and read all the doctors of the church, so you would know better than Alison.”
Stephen had, at that moment, no more notion of what the doctors of the church thought about the question than what the man in the moon thought about it. He had spoken from his own instincts; but, he decided, there was no need to tell Marie that. “How many children had you?”
“Two. A girl four years old, and a baby boy.”
Just like Griselda’s children, Stephen thought, and then had no idea why he kept thinking about Griselda. Someone or other had said once that Walter, in the story, was an allegory for God, and that the tale taught us to be patient in the face of adversity beyond our understanding, and to trust that God had a purpose. But then, Stephen wondered, why had he not simply told the story of Job, and left poor Griselda out of it? Well – he remembered Alison saying that clerks never had anything good to say of women, and he remembered wanting to prove her wrong, but he was beginning to feel that he had gone about it all the wrong way.
“I am sorry, Marie.”
“It is well. It was three years ago and more.”
“I am sorry, all the same.”
“Thank you.” Her slim hand rested on his shoulder for a moment, and he found himself desiring her again, which was wholly wrong when she had come to him in doubt and grief. He had never had women friends before, and he found it all very confusing. He picked up his book again when she had gone, but could not concentrate. It was, he decided, a good thing that women were not allowed in the Oxford colleges; and yet, he had no wish to return to Oxford now.
* * *
Autumn brought visitors to Bath: the Knight, who was coming to try the effect of the waters upon an old war injury; his son the Squire; and the little priest Sir John, who was now the chaplain in the Knight’s household. Madame Eglantine had been visibly unamused by his tale of Chaunticleer and Pertelote, so Stephen wasn’t surprised that he had sought out new employment. It was plain that he found the Knight’s service more congenial; the sly twinkle in his eye had ripened into open mirth.
“Father doesn’t really need a priest,” the Squire confided to Stephen, “he’s so holy himself that it would be superfluous. What he really needs is a jester, and Sir John’s just the right man for that.”
Alison had not permitted the travelers to put up at an inn, but had insisted on hosting them. In the evenings there was story-telling. The Squire finally finished his tale of Canacee; he found an eager audience, this time, in Jenny, who was of an age to be enchanted by magic rings and talking birds.
After the Squire had finished, he courteously invited his hostess’s daughter to tell the next tale. By now she had progressed far enough in her Latin to begin struggling through Virgil, and she told the tale of the fall of Troy and Aeneas’s flight with his son and aged father, ending with his wife’s death and the discovery of his destiny to found Rome. She told it well, for a child of her age, and with only a few inaccuracies. The company applauded her, but Father Gregory was looking sharply at Jenny, and then at Stephen.
There was nothing unfit in the fall of Troy, Stephen thought defensively, even if it was a pagan work. He had not yet decided what they would do when they came to Dido, but surely Jenny already knew something of such matters; she was, after all, Alison’s daughter, and about to turn twelve.
Then Father Gregory told the story of Abelard and Heloise, as Stephen tried to conceal his growing anger beneath a mask of scholarly meekness. He had assumed that the old parish priest was no very good scholar, and that this was why Alison had not made him Jenny’s tutor. He thought, listening, that Father Gregory had some ability with rhetoric, and was evidently more educated than Stephen had supposed. It was, however, clear that Father Gregory thought the tale had an application, and intended it to be a warning for both Stephen and Jenny. So he was scholarly enough to have taken charge of Jenny’s education, but did not approve. Stephen wondered, then, why Father Gregory had permitted them to borrow the Bible; he must have had some idea what they wanted it for.
Alison shot Father Gregory a look that Stephen could not quite read, and began a story of her own. “This is the tale of the good and wise lady Nenyve, who loved learning with all her heart, and wished to become a great scholar of magic. And so she traveled far and wide to study with the wizard Merlin, who knew more sorcery than any man alive. And yet she was sore afraid of him, for he was a devil’s son, and ...” Alison glanced meaningfully at Father Gregory, “... a lecherous old goat who always imagined others to be as lustful as he was. And evermore he sought by snares and wiles to have her maidenhead...”
When Alison had ended her tale by imprisoning Merlin in a tree – “and good riddance to him” – the Knight suggested to Sir John, “You might tell the story that you told us upon the road. That was a good tale, I thought, and worth hearing again.”
The little priest nodded, and embarked upon a fable of a fox, a wolf, and a lion, finding voices for his characters that kept his audience in fits of laughter. Stephen almost lost sight of the moral of the tale, which was a warning against backbiting or using foul words against another.
* * *
“I pray you,” said Alison, when the guests had all departed for their homes or gone to bed, “do not take too much notice of Father Gregory. He is a good man in his way, but he has very little power of invention, which causes him to suppose things that are not true.”
“Isn’t that a paradox?”
“Not really. Not when there are people in the world who do have invention, and can use it to do things that have not been done before. Besides,” Alison added, rather cryptically, “there have been times when he has been glad enough to make use of my powers of invention to supply his own ... lack.”
“Are you going to bed with him?” Stephen asked, suddenly illuminated.
“You don’t think he would have let me borrow a Bible out of the church for a few friendly words and a bolt of cloth, do you?”
Stephen was not sure what he had thought, but he supposed Alison was right; one did not walk out of the church with a Bible unless one had something very precious to offer as surety, and he supposed that from Father Gregory’s point of view, Alison’s body might seem sufficiently precious. She was younger than Father Gregory, after all, and Stephen supposed that in the course of five marriages she must have acquired certain ... skills. He found himself blushing.
“Do you think it shameful?”
“I ... ah ... For a priest, yes, I think it is shameful. He has made vows.”
“Vows that not one man in a hundred is framed by nature to keep,” said Alison, “but I am glad you do not think it shameful for me.”
“It would hardly be good manners to tell you if I did think so,” said Stephen, rallying a little, "and you are the one paying my wages."
Alison chuckled. “I told you that you ought not to be a priest. You would have to reprove me very sharply if you were a priest, even if you kept a mistress yourself. Especially if you kept a mistress yourself.”
“Does Father Gregory reprove other men?”
“Of course he does.”
“That is hypocrisy.”
“It is his duty. Would it be better for him to commit fornication and neglect his duty?”
They were disputing, Stephen realized suddenly. Not as scholars did in formal debates at Oxford, with a repertoire of well-worn arguments from the church fathers and the pagan philosophers, but as it sometimes happened in the taverns, where the abstract questions came to life and the arguments took lightning-swift twists. Alison would have been good at the game; she had a gift for making audacious and unexpected assertions that nonetheless held up, or at least forced her interlocutor into deeper and more treacherous waters before he gathered the wits to refute them. She would have held her own in the drinking contests, too. No matter; a woman of Alison’s age would have been welcome in a student tavern only in the capacity of a tapstress or bawd.
“If you admit that Father Gregory is doing wrong, don’t you bear some blame for leading him astray?”
“I did what I must do to put a Bible in my hands, and in my daughter’s hands. Is there any wrong in that?”
“Some would say that there is very great wrong in it, for it is dangerous when ignorant folk interpret the Bible according to their own will.”
Alison smiled. “And that is why I am taking care that Jenny should not be ignorant. When you have taught her what you know, she can correct me.”
* * *
On the following evening, the storytelling continued. The Knight told them of King Richard the Lionheart and the noble pagan Saladin; Harry countered with a merry tale of Robin Hood; and Jack, cheerfully heedless of the fact that there were two priests present, told them about two of his tenants who had swapped wives for a week.
It came to Stephen, suddenly, that the Knight had said nothing at all about certain matters one would expect to hear of in the tale of Richard and Saladin. He doesn’t believe in God, Stephen realized, or at any rate, he isn’t certain that our God is the true one and the Mohammedans’ God is false. And yet, he is a good man. He didn’t know what to think about this.
Then it was Marie’s turn, and she told a tale of a poor young scholar who could speak in many sorts of poetry, and who so impressed the gods Pluto and Proserpina with his learning that they allowed him to wander at will in the realms of the dead. He found one living woman there, lost on her way back to the realms of the living, and offered to be her guide; but as they stumbled back into the sunlight, he found himself unable to speak of his love for her.
“And I pray you, resolve me this,” said Marie, “whether the lady ought not to be the wooer, if the man will not or dares not?”
Ending a tale with a question regarding love was always a good way to spark conversation; while the guests debated amongst themselves, Stephen turned to Marie and asked, in an undertone, “That is a strange tale. Where did you find it? It is something like the old tale of Sir Orfeo, and something like the Divina Commedia – but not very much like either. Is it French?”
“I found it in my own mind,” said Marie, smiling. “Perhaps it is not a good tale, but it is mine.”
He blushed. “No – I thought it good. I was only – curious.”
“Will you not tell us your tale, Stephen?” asked Marie, pitching her voice a little louder so the others would fall silent. “Don’t be shy; you’re among friendly company.”
The blood was pounding in his temples, so that he could hardly hear his own voice. “The tales I would tell have not been written yet.”
She smiled at him again. “Then you must write them.”
* * *
He hired a horse and set out for Oxford early the next morning, leaving a note lest Alison should suspect him of deserting them, although in point of fact he was not sure whether he intended to return. He took all the money he had earned, but left his books; he could always send for them later.
He kept thinking of Father Gregory and that damned story of Abelard and Heloise. The old priest had entirely mistaken the object of Stephen’s interest, but he had not been wrong about certain other matters. He had described Abelard as musing that there could be no accord between writing-desks and cradles, books and distaffs, pens and spindles; that one could not remain intent upon thoughts of philosophy amid the screams of children – unless one were rich.
Weren’t he and Marie better as they were, single and unencumbered, free to teach their respective pupils? And didn’t he belong at Oxford? He had tarried in Bath too long already.
* * *
Three days brought him to Oxford; he occupied most of the fourth in calling on old masters and old friends, a few too many of whom seemed to have gone away in the long months of his absence. After that he was not sure how to occupy his time. He went to a favorite tavern, where he recognized no one and spoke to no one but the boy who served him. At least the food and the ale were as good as he remembered, and almost as cheap. What then? He ought to have brought his books so that he could resume his studies at once; Oxford was no place for the idle.
On the following day, he went to a little shop that sold secondhand books, and lingered long without anything in particular catching his fancy.
“Have you anything in French?” he asked at last.
The book-seller showed him a new collection of ballades by a lady poet at the French court, a widow as it seemed. They were copied out in an elegant hand, and they spoke of love and grief; he thought Marie would like them very much.
“How much?”
“Five shillings.”
Nearly his full quarter’s wages. If he paid it over, the die would be cast; he must return to Bath, if only because he would have room and board there without paying any money down.
He paid.
* * *
He thought that, after all, he had been right to make that extravagant and frivolous purchase, and right to come back. Marie said, a little breathlessly, that she had never thought to own a book, and that she had not known there were such books, and that she loved the ballades. So did Jenny; she sat by the fire, reading them aloud in her high clear voice. So, surprisingly, did Alison.
“Well,” she said, with some satisfaction, when Marie had translated some of the poems into graceful English. “I always said that if women had written books, they would be worth hearing. I don’t know that I care for this ‘I am a widow clothed in black’ business though. Likely she’d feel better if she wore scarlet, and why shouldn’t she, I ask you?”
“Why not, indeed?” said Marie, flourishing the new gown Alison was making for her.
“Do you ... mean always to remain a widow?” Stephen tried.
Marie smiled, letting her dimples show. “Why, Stephen, I thought you’d never ask.”
* * *
They were married in the winter, and planned to leave for Oxford in the spring. There would be employment there, Stephen knew; young men needing to improve their Latin or Greek in a hurry, and likely there would be people who wanted to learn French as well. Now that it was impossible for him to make a career in the Church, he could not always be Alison’s dependent.
“You ought to take Jenny with you,” said Alison. “‘Tis time she learned how to manage a household of her own, and when your first babe comes, you’ll be glad of an extra pair of hands.”
“Will you not miss her?” Stephen asked.
“I can spare her for a year or two. Maybe I’ll come and visit her. I always was fond of a good-looking student.”
“Maybe Jenny will meet a student of her own,” said Marie slyly, in the way of brides who think everyone else ought to be a bride too.
“Maybe she will,” said Alison. “But no hurry.” She looked at Stephen and said, “Teach her well, and let her have ... as much time for learning as you can give her. A few years, at least. You understand?”
He thought once again of Griselda in the tale, of the way she had asked Walter not to treat his new bride as she had been treated, for the girl was of soft and tender breeding and would not be so apt to bear it as Griselda had been. “Alison?” he asked suddenly. “Where was your mother, when you were Jenny’s age?”
“Dead five years and more, by then,” said Alison, and then added, “She wasn’t yet thirty. I’m three-and-fifty and, God be thanked, I have my strength yet. But we know not the day nor the hour, as it says in the scripture, and I would she learned how to shift for herself in the world. Before she marries, not after.”
“Is Latin the way for a girl to learn to shift for herself in the world, do you think?” Stephen asked.
“Who knows what may be?” said Alison. “Do you think that lady-poet of yours knows Latin?”
“I expect she does. She writes like one who is lettered.”
“Well, there you are.”
Stephen tried to picture life in a household of lady-poets and wondered what it would be like. It was a thing, surely, that had not been done before. But Alison, he thought, was right: who knew what might be?
