The Green Man

One

It seemed a day like any other. Or as much like any other as days had been for the past nine months. For the autumn and winter just gone had been two of the worst seasons in living memory.

It had started the previous August with tearing gales and lashing rain, ruining the crops as they stood, unharvested, in the fields, and not letting up until late October. But when the wind and wet finally died away, it was only to give place to early frosts so severe that they turned the ground to iron; and by Christmas heavy falls of snow blanketed the countryside. Vegetables rotted in the earth, and those that were, with Herculean effort and broken spade-handles, eventually lifted into the light of day, were so blighted by disease, and so stunted, as to be barely worth the effort. On the other hand, people had to live — or try to — and any effort was better than starvation. For, of course, it goes without saying that famine, blood brother to storms and subsequent bad harvests, stalked the land from north to south, east to west. Meat, too, was scarce, cattle and sheep having succumbed to the biting cold, dying where they stood in the open fields as they struggled to survive. What hay and grain herdsmen had managed to lay their hands on, soon ran out or was commandeered for the troops mustering somewhere — or so we were told — in Yorkshire and Northumberland, ready to repel invasion by the Scots.

Our northern neighbours had been causing trouble along the marches for some two or three years now, and rumours of proposed retaliation had even become a common talking point in our south-western fastness, where what went on in the border country between England and Scotland was usually a matter of supreme indifference to us. Indeed, what transpired in France had more immediacy for Bristolians — although, admittedly, only a very little. Our preoccupation was always with Ireland, and the love-hate, friend-foe relationship that existed between us (you will note that after all those years living in the place I had at last begun to count myself a citizen) and the men of Waterford and the southern Irish coast.

However, as I have said, it was Scotland — a country generally as remote to your average southerner as the moon — that was one of the two main topics of conversation in the Green Lattis alehouse on that early May evening in the year of Our Lord, 1482. The other topic, it goes without saying, was what, if anything, our wives and goodies would have managed to scrounge, beg or borrow for our suppers; for as we had moved into the new year at the end of March, nothing much had changed. Food was as difficult to come by as ever.

My old friend, Jack Nym, was looking particularly gloomy. Goody Nym’s meals were something to be avoided at the best of times and the scarcity of victuals had proved a godsend to her; an excuse to serve up nothing but mouldy bread and a few even mouldier vegetables. Kind-hearted neighbours shared their own meagre meals with the carter and his wife, taking pity on Jack’s rumbling belly.

‘What’s your woman giving you for supper tonight, then?’ he asked me, staring gloomily into his beaker of ale.

‘Oh, Adela will have contrived something or another,’ I answered with slightly more confidence than I actually felt.

But my wife was a good manager and a shrewd housewife who had her regular contacts among the stallholders of the city market. Always polite, always a prompt payer, they were willing to provide her with any extra titbits or savoury morsels that their own womenfolk had rejected. Nevertheless, the constant recurrence of a brown stew made from bones and bits of offal, flavoured with the herbs Adela had picked and dried the previous summer, was beginning to pall. For a good trencherman like myself, it was an affront to a hearty appetite.

‘I’m losing weight,’ I grumbled. ‘I had to take my belt in another notch this morning.’

‘Consider yourself lucky to have a belt,’ remarked a stranger — a travelling mummer judging by the cap and bells he had just thrown down on the bench beside him — who had joined our table, squeezing on to the recently vacated stool next to Jack. (The inn was packed to suffocation with people, like myself, drowning their worries and sorrows.) He went on, ‘In some parts o’ the country, they’re boiling ’em and eating the leather.’

‘Pooh!’ said Jack. ‘D’you expect us to believe that? Go rattle yer bells in someone else’s ears.’

The mummer took a long draught of ale and then slammed his beaker back on the table.

‘Think I’m joking, do you? Mother o’ God! You lot down here don’t know you’re born! Think you’re hard done by? You know nothing! Nothing! It’s twice, three times as bad in London and down into Kent. But further north! Dear God in Heaven! People are dying like flies in summer. In places, the ground’s still so hard, they can’t bury the dead. The charnel-houses are full and likely to remain so until the weather changes. This bit o’ May sunshine and warmth you been gettin’ these few days past ain’t even reached as far as Gloucester yet. I was there yesterday with my friends.’ And he jerked his head in the direction of a settle set against the wall where a couple of other mummers sat, gaily bedecked, but with faces as long as sin, glumly supping their ale. ‘We did a bit of mumming on the abbey green, but folk didn’t want to know.’ He jiggled the purse at his belt, but there was no comforting, responsive chink. ‘Empty!’ he informed us. Our new acquaintance threw a few coins on the table. ‘That’s all our worldly wealth, my friends. It’s the abbey dormitory for us tonight, and some black bread and broth from the monks’ kitchen.’ He glanced about him. ‘Same story here by the looks o’ things. Doom and gloom. Doom and more gloom. Have you had any riots yet?’

‘Riots?’ Jack and I asked, almost in one breath. ‘Where has there been rioting? And who’s been rioting?’ I added.

‘Everyone, everywhere,’ was the comprehensive answer, accompanied by a shrug of the shoulders. ‘There’s a mort of unrest all over the country.’

It was my turn to shrug. ‘Well, I suppose that isn’t so surprising if conditions are as bad as you say.’

‘It ain’t only conditions brought about by the weather,’ he retorted. ‘Wages are falling, especially in sheep farming country.’ He took another swig of ale and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. ‘It’s this war between France and Burgundy that’s half the trouble. More than half.’

I took a closer look at him. The mummer had a broken nose and bright, inquisitive eyes set in a small, shrewd face with, I suspected, an even shrewder brain behind it. Most of his calling had no interest in anything beyond shaking their bells, waggling their staves and earning enough by their antics to keep body and soul together. But this man was different: he evidently took a lively interest in what was going on around him, listened to what people said and had sense enough to add two and two and come up with the answer four.

Not so Jack Nym.

‘Wha’s it got to do with France and Burgundy?’ he demanded truculently. He had all your average Englishman’s contempt for anything that went on outside of his own borders.

Our companion looked down his nose, squinting into his empty beaker. ‘War’s going badly for Burgundy,’ he said. ‘People reckon we ought to be going to the aid of Duchess Mary and her husband. There’s a lot o’ bad feeling against King Edward that he won’t send troops to assist the Hapsburg.’

‘Why?’ Jack’s tone was more belligerent than ever. He was slightly drunk, and that always made him aggressive.

‘Oh, for pity’s sake, think man!’ I exclaimed, irritated, before the mummer had a chance to reply. ‘This country relies on Burgundy to buy vast quantities of our wool and woven goods. It’s one of our best markets in the whole of Europe. Furthermore, our own Princess Margaret is its Dowager Duchess.’

Jack gave due consideration to this argument, then nodded in agreement. He was well aware from his experience as a carter that this was true. He switched sides.

‘Then why don’t the King do summat about it? Why don’t he send men to aid Maximilian?’

‘Because,’ I reminded him, at the same time signalling to a passing pot-boy to refill our beakers and also that of the mummer, ‘Edward receives a big, fat, annual pension from King Louis — as do a number of his friends and cronies — and my guess is that he can’t afford to lose it. Which he surely would if he intervened in the war on Burgundy’s behalf.’

‘Still,’ Jack objected, ‘if not doing so is making him unpopular … if people are rioting, as our friend here says they are, you’d think …’

‘Money’s money,’ I pointed out. ‘Especially when you have all your wife’s family to support. The Woodvilles are a rapacious lot by all I’ve ever heard of them.’

The mummer nodded. ‘By all anybody’s ever heard o’ them,’ he concurred. ‘And then there’s all the king’s doxies and by-blows making claims on him, as well.’ He looked across the table at me. ‘I’m with you, friend. I don’t reckon King Edward’ll be raising any troops. Leastways, not to send to Burgundy.’

‘But somewhere?’ I queried. ‘Where then?’

He grimaced. ‘Scotland’s my guess. There were fighting up north, on and off, all last year.’ He jerked his head backwards at his two dozy companions, now both half asleep, one dribbling ale from the corner of his mouth, the other just beginning to snore with an even, gentle rhythm. ‘We was way up last summer, over the border in fact, before the start of this terrible weather drove us southwards in a hurry. We was near Edinburgh when Lord Howard sailed the English fleet up the River Forth and burned one o’ their Scottish towns to the ground. Blackness, I think they called it — although it ain’t easy to know what those heathenish bastards call anything, the way they mangle the English tongue. And o’ course, that was another reason we had to leave Scotland in double quick time. We Saxons — Sassenachs is their word for it — weren’t popular to begin with, but after Lord Howard’s little foray, as you might guess, we were lucky to escape with our lives.’

‘Is the Duke of Gloucester involved in any of this?’ I asked, my thoughts naturally turning towards that member of the royal family I not only respected and knew well — I didn’t refer to this as it would surely have raised more questions and answers than I was prepared to be troubled with — but whose birthday and age I also shared.

‘Oh lord, yes!’ The mummer was emphatic. ‘As it so happened, both he and the king were at Nottingham when we passed through there last October. There was no official announcement, but all the townsfolk we spoke to said it was to do with the war in Scotland. In fact, it was only a few weeks later when we fell in with a travelling tinker who’d come from the Scottish marches who told us that Berwick has been put under siege.’

‘Where’s this Berwick?’ Jack wanted to know. For once, I couldn’t air my superior knowledge. I didn’t know, either.

‘Scotland,’ our acquaintance informed us kindly with a condescending smile. (We were so obviously west country turnips with very little experience of the wider world.) ‘Right on the border. Mind you, until about twenty years ago, it was English.’

‘So how did them Scots buggers get hold of it?’ Jack demanded, jutting his jaw pugnaciously. ‘Some dopey garrison commander let them in?’

But on this head, the mummer was unable to satisfy our curiosity. So I’ll set down here what I learned later; that two decades previously, the late King Henry and his wife, Margaret of Anjou, fleeing from the victorious Yorkist army, fetched up in Scotland and bartered Berwick for Scottish aid. Now, I presumed — correctly as it turned out — King Edward wanted it back; a sop to those of his many subjects who thought him a mercenary coward not to go to Burgundy’s aid.

‘Ah, well,’ said Jack, scratching himself and disturbing his fleas, ‘if it’s that far away, there’s nothing to worry us.’

‘Nothing at all,’ I agreed.

I really should have known better than to tempt fate. And I should certainly have known better than to treat us all to yet another beaker of ale. Money was scarce and getting scarcer as people saved what little they had for necessities instead of the frippery inessentials of a pedlar’s pack. True, I continued to do a reasonable trade in needles, thread, laces and suchlike articles; but the items that really brought in the money — gloves, lengths of silk, the occasional copper or silver ring, picked up cheap and sold at a profit — now remained unsold week after week. As I have already mentioned, Adela was a clever housewife and had always been able to make one groat do the work of two when needed. And, indeed, during the past five years, since her marriage to me, this particular skill had been much in demand, but never so much as now when even early May had brought little relief to the sun-starved land. But a third beaker of ale, shared with convivial friends and strangers in the Green Lattis, made life appear a little rosier, a trifle more tolerable, than it had done before.

But all good things must come to an end. Our new-found acquaintance, the mummer, announced that he must be on his way, roused his two companions from their drunken slumber and asked for directions to St Augustine’s Abbey. Jack thanked me for my generosity, but regretted that he was unable to stop any longer and return the compliment as his goody would be expecting him home for supper. (Goody Nym was never expecting him, and I doubted if she knew what supper was, but my sneer, indicating the belief that this was a blatant lie, was carefully ignored.) In a shorter time than it takes to tell, I found myself deserted, sitting alone at our table, ruefully counting the depleted contents of my purse and sobering rapidly.

A small, but determined hand clutched my sleeve and shook my arm. I turned in some astonishment to discover my seven-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, standing beside me.

‘Bess?’ I queried.

She gave me a leery glance which plainly proclaimed that she thought me as drunk as a wheelbarrow.

‘Who else could it be?’ she demanded impertinently. ‘Do I look like another person?’

I might resent her manner, but I knew full well it was useless me trying to enact the Roman father. I could never sustain the role.

‘Just tell me what you’re doing here before I lose my temper,’ I instructed her sharply.

‘Mother sent me to fetch you,’ she answered, totally impervious to the threat of paternal anger, and adding reproachfully, ‘She guessed I might find you in the alehouse, and I have.’

I frowned. It was unlike Adela, however much she disapproved of my wasting money in such places at a time when it was sorely needed for other things, to send one of the children to winkle me out. She was a tolerant woman and an indulgent wife who would never put me in an awkward situation if she could possibly avoid it. (I noted a couple of grinning faces at a nearby table, and cursed under my breath.)

‘So what does your mother want?’ I asked, loudly enough for my fellow drinkers to understand that I was being called home for a specific purpose and not simply because my wife considered me to be malingering.

But my darling daughter refused to play my game.

‘I don’t know,’ she replied, getting ready to leave, with or without me. ‘She just said that I was to fetch you home if I found you.’

I settled myself more firmly on my stool.

‘Something must have happened,’ I argued sulkily. ‘Otherwise, she wouldn’t have sent you looking for me.’

Elizabeth sighed. She was a bright child and observed a great deal more than one imagined. She knew me in this recalcitrant schoolboy mood, and guessed that without further information I would dig in my heels and refuse to move. She pondered a moment or two, staring at me thoughtfully.

‘Well, I don’t know for certain,’ she said at last, ‘but it might have something to do with that funny little man who called at the house earlier this afternoon. About an hour or so ago.’

‘What funny little man?’ All my senses were suddenly alert to potential danger.

My daughter shrugged irritably. ‘How do I know? I just caught a glimpse of him when Mother answered the door.’ She creased her brow in an effort of recollection. ‘I think I might have seen him before, though.’

‘Where? When?’ I had a sudden nasty feeling in the pit of my stomach.

‘I can’t remember. A long time ago.’ Elizabeth ran out of patience and stamped her foot. ‘Why don’t you just come home, Father, and find out for yourself?’

It was the obvious solution, but my uneasiness was growing, although it would have been difficult for me to say quite why.

‘Did your mother recognize this man?’ I enquired, catching hold of Elizabeth’s skirt to prevent her leaving.

‘She must have done,’ was the answer. ‘She let him inside. He went into the parlour with her and I heard them talking. Mother said you weren’t home and the man said he’d wait. He said it was urgent.’

‘Is he still there?’

Elizabeth nodded. Her eyes brightened suddenly. ‘Oh! And he brought us a lovely big piece of meat. I don’t know what it is exactly, but it’s roasting on the kitchen spit right now and it smells wonderful. And he also brought a great fat capon — for the end of the week, he said. Oh, do come on, Father! Just the thought of that meat is making my belly turn somersaults.’

‘You run ahead, then,’ I answered slowly, adding mendaciously, ‘I haven’t paid my shot yet. I’ll follow you just as soon as I’ve done so. Tell your mother I’ll only be a minute or two behind you.’

Elizabeth accepted this without demur, kissed my cheek affectionately in atonement for any offence she might have given — she knew from experience that any demonstration of submission could always win me round — and tripped gracefully out of the Green Lattis, looking forward to a roast meat supper and without a care in the world.

I, on the other hand, sat as though rooted to my rickety stool, staring unhappily into space and concocting various wild and impractical schemes for immediate flight. At the same time, I had no real idea why the advent of this stranger, and his urgent desire to speak to me, had filled me with such unease. Someone (Virgil?) had once remarked that he feared the Greeks when they came bearing gifts (or words to that effect). My sentiments exactly; and this ‘Greek’ had brought not just one, but two substantial offerings of flesh when most people would have been overjoyed with a very small pigeon. That in itself was sufficient to make any sane man suspicious.

But when I analysed my apparently unwarranted fear, there was something more. My daughter’s description of ‘a funny little man’, whom she had a vague memory of having seen before, made me think at once of Timothy Plummer, Spymaster General for (at different times) both King Edward and his brother, Richard, Duke of Gloucester. His various appearances in my life had never boded me any good, and I feared that this one would prove to be no exception.

‘You drinking, Roger?’ the landlord called out as he passed, pushing his way through the ever-increasing press of bodies.

Whoever else lost money in times of famine and economic crisis, it was rarely the alehouses; at least not those in the towns and cities. They provided comfort of a kind and a temporary forgetfulness of men’s problems. I was in the wrong trade, but then, I had always known that. But I liked the freedom it gave me, the sense of being in charge of my own destiny, answerable to no man but myself. The previous year, I had briefly given up that independence to work for, and be paid by, my neighbour, Alderman Foster, now coming to the end of his term as Mayor; but when the job was finished, I had vowed to myself never to work at somebody else’s behest again.

‘Another beaker of the same?’ the landlord persisted. He hated the waste of space non-drinking customers took up on the stools and benches.

I shook my head resolutely and stood up. Before I had taken two steps, another man, intent on drowning his sorrows, had slipped into my seat.

Once outside the door, in the lee of All Saints’ Church, I paused to breathe in the cool late afternoon breezes. There was a hint of rain in the air and a chill that, although not untypical of early May, was nevertheless far more pronounced than was customary, even for that unreliable month. I fought down the urge to turn and run — anywhere so long as it was away from Small Street and the man who was waiting there for me.

Slowly, reluctantly, I forced myself to face the right direction.

I admonished myself angrily not to be so stupid; to stop behaving like a child or an imbecile. After all, I wasn’t even sure that the ‘strange little man’ really was Timothy Plummer. He might simply be someone who, having heard of my reputation as a solver of mysteries, had one of his own which needed investigation. And that, of course, would explain the gifts of meat as payment in advance for my services. After all, there was nothing more acceptable, or more of a bribe, in these dark and miserable times than something to fill an empty stomach.

I gave a deep sigh of relief. Of course that was it! I was allowing my imagination to run riot. And the longer I thought about things, the greater my folly in giving way to nervous fancies seemed to be.

If it were true, as the mummer had assured us it was, that King Edward and his brother were planning a summer invasion of Scotland, Timothy Plummer would be with one or the other of them, as indispensable as always. (Well, he liked to think so.) There would be absolutely no reason for him to be in the west country looking for me. It was true that I had been called upon, once or twice, to dabble my fingers in royal concerns, and had, on one occasion, gone to France in the wake of an invading army, but there had been a reason for that. I had already been engaged in an investigation that had left me little choice in the matter. But I had had nothing to do with Prince Richard or any member of his family for nearly two years. Surely, therefore, I was perfectly safe, and was letting myself fall prey to unfounded and childish fancies.

My mood lightened, and I was suddenly able to look forward to a supper of roast meat with an anticipation unmarred by ridiculous doubts and fears. The evening air all at once seemed less chilly, the clouds overhead less threatening. There was a spring in my step as I walked down Small Street, and I was even humming — in my own peculiarly tuneless fashion — a somewhat disreputable song vaguely remembered from my youth. I even began to feel carefree.

Fool! I should have known better.

As I pushed open the door of my house, the air was redolent with the delicious aroma of roasting pork with its sizzling fat, a smell I had been deprived of for what seemed like years.

‘I’m home!’ I shouted.