‘Wait-and-see!’ My friend tapped the side of her nose. ‘A surprise.’
‘Oh lord, we haven’t got to watch another pair of priests being flailed around the yard, have we?’ I sat down again with great reluctance. The hour’s sermon on Divine Love, delivered by a Franciscan with a blocked nose, had been tedious. ‘Won’t your children be missing you?’ I muttered.
‘Lizbeth! Be patient!’
The last thing I wanted was to watch some poor wretch doing penance for their sins. God’s mercy! I was the last person to desire to cast the first stone. Part of me was bursting to tell Margery about my encounters with Lord Hastings, but her tolerance of others’ foibles had narrowed since her marriage to the goldsmith Hugh Paddesley, a man I did not care for. Sometimes she sounded more like Paddesley than he did.
‘Ah, here we go,’ she exclaimed, nudging me with her elbow.
A ragtag mob of people, who had not heard the sermon, was thickening the crowd. Alarm bells sounded in my head. Adultery! It had to be adultery! I cast a sharp look at my friend. Had she suspected I was dreaming of taking a lover? No, that was lighting a bonfire with green wood for I read no rebuke in her eyes, and Shore and Paddesley were discussing cockfighting with their friend Shelley. Nothing was untoward.
‘I promise you, Lizbeth!’ she exclaimed. ‘You’ll be glad you stayed.’
There was only one penitent in the open cart, a woman in a white shift with her long dark hair unbound about her shoulders. Not a common strumpet by the way she held herself. Well nourished, too, neither scrawny nor obese. The crowd whooped as the sheriff’s soldiers pulled her roughly down onto the cobbles and untied her wrists. A priest handed her a lit taper, and then with two soldiers ahead of her and two behind her with their halberd blades prodding her forwards, she began her journey of contrition around St Paul’s Yard.
I had seen these walks of penitence before, but today the crowd’s jeers made me shudder as though someone had walked across my grave. The human cockroaches from the back lanes had brought buckets slopping with excrement. Soon the woman’s shift would resemble a filthy rag.
At first she tried to keep her dignity, but as the pelting grew, she started to flinch, her body jerking this way and that like a thief on a hangman’s rope. As she approached our stand, I could see she was about ten years older than I. Her forehead and left cheek were bleeding, and spittle and dung spattered her hair and skin. The thin, putrid shift showed her nipples and she was shivering as though she had the marsh disease.
Shore and Margery’s husband leaned over to spit at her.
‘Come on! Hiss!’ Margery sprang to her feet and, like the other merchant’s wives, shook her fist and jeered. I stood up with the rest but I could not abuse the poor creature. This was no prostitute snared to give the crowd its monthly dose of titillation. She could have been an erring wife or a courtesan; just a woman who had fallen into temptation.
‘Vile,’ I muttered, wincing as I watched the woman whimper and fling up her hands as the stoning began again.
Flushed and pleased, Margery subsided on the bench and put her mouth to my ear. ‘That was your father’s greedy whore. She was caught last week fleecing a merchant from the Grocers’ Guild. Didn’t you hear all the hubbub? The guild has expelled him.’
‘Sweet Christ!’ Now I understood why her parents had hurried mine away. Or had my father done the hurrying?
I searched the faces around me. Did our husbands know?
‘Too tame,’ Paddesley was complaining, with a sneer of nostril. ‘They could have whipped the whore around the yard.’
‘Aye, better sport,’ agreed Shore, which made me want to stick a dagger in him.
‘For my part, I cannot see what charm she held for the poor dotard,’ Master Shelley was saying. ‘Breasts like a beggar’s purse. Whereas that cherrylips a month ago.’ He whistled. His eyes skewed covertly in my direction. ‘Legs to her armpits, but this hag …’
‘Ah, but …’ Paddesley whispered something behind his hand. The other two laughed.
Margery, excluded, reddened. ‘You might give me thanks,’ she muttered, taking out her annoyance on me. ‘I thought you’d be pleased.’
‘Pleased! I found it offensive.’
‘Twaddle, Lizbeth! Women like her make it harder for the rest of us.’
‘Make what harder, Mistress Paddesley,’ quipped Shelley, elbowing her husband.
‘Yes, what are you trying to say, pet?’ Paddesley asked, trying to exchange a grin with me.
Margery was already in a nose-up huff. ‘No matter. Can we go now?’
‘Yes, Margery, what did you mean?’ I whispered as we descended the stairs ahead of the others.
She had to be coaxed. ‘Just that respectable wives like us are not supposed to play the games in bed that she does. If we do, we’re accused of being wanton.’
‘So it’s a sin to enjoy a husband’s lovemaking? How very absurd, but then I wouldn’t know, would I?’ How bitter I must have sounded.
‘Well, I think the whore deserved her punishment, Lizbeth. She’s the worse sort, tempting husbands to be unfaithful.’
‘What, you think she’s worse than a common strumpet?’
‘Winchester geese do it to stay alive. And it’s a business transaction for men who have too much—’ She gestured. ‘You know.’
‘Ah, “the fiery men who become ill if they do not have regular intercourse with a woman”,’ I said, quoting a treatise on the issue.
‘Exactly,’ agreed Margery. ‘Whereas that bitch’s sort does it because they enjoy it.’
‘So it’s her pleasure you take issue with?’
‘Well, yes.’
It was a point of view I had once shared. The sisterhood of respectability. Guild wives were supposed to uphold God’s commandments to the letter. But poor Margery was feeding the incubus of Envy. If she could not enjoy the sport of the bedchamber, she did not want anyone else to either.
I, too, had never enjoyed a man’s lovemaking. Suffered, yes. Shore had first used me when I was fourteen years old. His recent impotence was a blessing. Alas, now I was five and twenty! More than half my life gone already. But none of the London guildsmen had measured to my taste. No man except … And into my mind at that moment crept a scheme so outrageously sinful that I halted on the cobbles with a gasp.
‘Lizbeth, what’s wrong? Are you ill?’
‘Possibly.’ I laughed. Crazed might be the word.
Yes, wild, fevered, CRAZED! Deliciously mad with a spire-high, illuminated ‘C’.
IV
I took matters – and courage – into my own hands and trounced off to Beaumont’s Inn.
‘You’ll ‘ave to wait in line,’ the porter growled at me.
Wait? There I was, anxious to give, my heart beating frantically, and ahead of me were forty people, and more arriving.
‘Be patient, dearie,’ said the woman behind me as she heard me sigh. ‘It’s always like this on petition days.’
But then I saw his lordship’s steward come out and linger as though counting us. I left the line and hastened towards him but he vanished inside