You're a big boy, brother Petroc,' she said, and pouted again. I realised that she was searching my face in turn. 'Do you need anything?' 'Nothing,' I blurted.
'Petroc really is good,' said Will from the pallet. 'But not in a bad way,' he added. 'Time to be off, Clarissa.' I caught a warning note in his voice.
But the girl stood before me, as if trying to decide some small but niggling problem. Then she gave a lopsided smile and hooked her thumbs into the top of her unlaced tunic. She jerked it down, and her breasts came spilling out. They were large and round, and very white. As a sea of mortification flooded over me, burning and freezing every inch of my body, I saw blue veins and brown nipples. She shook them slightly, and they juddered. Then I saw that there were flecks of white on the puckered teats. Clarissa was nursing. I tore my eyes away and glanced at Will. He sat there with a rather confused grin on his pitted face. I had never before seen him blush. 'Clarissa…' he said again.
The girl shrugged, and tucked herself back into her ridiculously small bodice. She put her forefinger against her thumb to make a little circle. It would not be the only time I saw that odd little gesture tonight.
'It don't cost nothing to look,' she whispered to me, and, reaching down, flicked me in the crotch with her finger. Then she was gone. I heard the door grind open and thud shut again.
It hurt between my legs where she had flicked me. Her aim had been true – my pitifully weak flesh had risen proudly to meet her. I gazed dumbly around the room. Something had changed, although what it was I could not tell. Then I understood. It was I who had changed. Something had been broken or damaged. I was like a new knife that, used carelessly for the first time, picks up a nick or a tiny twist to the blade and never fits so smoothly into its sheath again. 'Oh no,' I breathed.
'They weren't that bad,' said Will, who had stepped to my side. Anyway, you didn't touch anything, so you should be safe. Soul-wise,' he added. He grabbed me round the shoulders and shook me. 'Come on, boy. Don't tell me that's the first pair of bubbies you've clapped eyes on.'
But it was – save nursing women glimpsed and hurriedly turned away from in the streets. Clarissa, too, was a mother, and yet Will… I shook my head to clear it. How easy damnation crept upon one. How simple, and how sweet. Oh, Christ. I thumped myself in the groin, and my flesh howled in protest. 'Easy, brother,' said Will. You need that for pissing.'
Then he was pulling me from the room and out into the dreary Balecester dusk, and we made our way to the Crozier, and I found Clarissa's breasts all too easy, after a brace of beers, to forgive, if not quite to forget.
Now Will was worrying about me yet again. 'Those oafs care for nothing but drink and women, and as they cannot lay their nasty mitts on the one, they must perforce concentrate on the other,' he was saying. 'And they are as greedy as swine: no sooner were you gone than Owen and Alfred rushed to look for the gold, but the passage was empty. Now they have returned to their slothful chatter, and I for one am tired of it. Besides, this is evidently a dangerous night to be walking about alone.'
What kind of a man plays games with knives and gold, Will?' I said. 'Who do you suppose he is?'
'If he is the man I have seen near the palace, I would say that he is a knight returned from the Holy Land. He has been under a hot sun, and he has a fighter's look. Besides, his clothes are foreign.' I remembered the man's green cloak: it had looked like rich, patterned silk. 'He was French, I think,' I said.
'Or Norman,' said Will. 'The French are small – this fellow is tall, and his lip curls like a Norman.' He spat.
Will had no love for the Normans. His father's grandfather, or the grandfather's grandfather, was a thegne who had died in King Harold's shield-wall at Hastings. The family lost their lands and had become wool-merchants instead, growing quite rich again and building a fine house in Morpeth, a town in the far north which my friend described as 'a whorehouse for Scots and drovers, but lacking the whores'. Will, the bright third son, had been packed off to Balecester 'to become a bishop', Will would say ruefully. 'A burgher's fat soul needs a bishop in the family if it is to squeeze into heaven. My father is about as pious as his sheep. But the Lord is a shepherd, and Pater trades in wool, so the old monster feels a certain kinship with his Redeemer' – and here he would wink at me – 'but he knows you can fleece men as well as lambkins: he longs to see me with crozier in one hand, shears in the other, and my holy bum on a golden woolsack.'
As we turned up Ox Lane, the street where I made my lodgings, the curfew bell sounded in the distance, and as always I strained to hear the scurrying of feet which I always imagined must follow. In my experience, bells were rung for a purpose: to summon, to warn and to drive away storms. Here in the town, no one took much notice, until the Sheriff s men came at them with their knobbled staves. We students were meant to fight these dullards, it was expected of us, and Will boasted a long scar that divided his tonsure almost from ear to ear. Sophisticate that I was, I felt inclined to be at home and abed whilst these rumpuses took place. And now, as my landlady's door came into view, I turned and caught that twinkle in my companion's eye that meant his night was not yet over.
We reached the threshold of my lodgings. Will tapped me on the chest with a loose fist. He was grinning like a hungry fox.
'Bar your door tonight, brother, in case your crusader comes a-knocking.'
'My crusader, Will? You are more than welcome to him yourself I replied. I was tired now, although it was not late, and sleep seemed the most desirable thing in the world. 'Keep safe, brother,' I said. 'Don't go picking up stray coins.' 'My eyes will be on the heavens, Patch, as always.'
And he turned and loped away into the moon-shadows. I climbed the narrow, creaking stairs to my lodgings under the roof. The latch stuck, as always, and then the usual smell of mildewed thatch greeted me. I lit a candle stub and let the warm tallow reek fight off the roofs stale breath – I had decided, soon after taking up residence, that the thatch was so damp that I was unlikely to set it on fire. My pallet, too, was damp and I shivered for a while, my sheepskin mantle tight around me. The candlelight flickered yellow along the rafters and over the bilious straw. Sleep was near, and the bedbugs were hungry. I could hear their little guts rumble as I snuffed out the flame.
Chapter Three
The next morning brought rain. It woke me in the near-dawn before matins, filtering through the decay of the thatch, drip-dripping onto the end of my nose and down into my open mouth. I carried the taste with me as I sloshed through the puddles, my robes hitched up like an alewife, and as I dozed through the morning service. Only when my head drooped and my jaw hit the pew in front with a hollow clunk did the savour of blood drive it away. I had bitten my tongue, but I was awake.
The rest of the morning passed in an unpleasant haze. My head throbbed slightly from the evening's beer, and my tongue throbbed where my teeth had pinched it. I had volunteered -always the eager one – to copy out a lengthy gloss of Origen for one of the masters, and the effort of keeping the quill steady left me exhausted by lunchtime. I found Will in the refectory. He looked sour and twisted, like a hawk with an excess of bile, and like a hawk he croaked and baited when I enquired about his nocturnal activities. He cheered somewhat when I insisted he drink my share of the small-beer provided. In the afternoon I would have to endure a lecture on Roman law, and I needed to keep a clear head. Any unfortunate who dropped off while Magister Jens Tribonensis lectured would be woken by the fat German's stave across his shoulders, and a verbal flaying thereafter. Master Jens might look like a jovial, red-faced buffoon, but he took his Cicero very seriously indeed.