London - Edward Rutherfurd [199]
The mayor was silent. The aldermen looked grave. And then Sampson Bull spoke up. “There’s something wrong here,” he said gruffly. “This man’s father was Simon the armourer, a respected citizen” – he gave the Exchequer clerk a stern look – “with whom, as I recall, Silversleeves had a quarrel. If Ducket is Simon’s son, then he’s a citizen by right, and that’s that.”
There were looks of relief. Nobody liked this case.
But Silversleeves was not a royal clerk for nothing. “If Simon was a citizen,” he said, “he probably shouldn’t have been. But either way it’s irrelevant. Because, Mayor and Alderman of the city, Adam Ducket holds his land by labour service at this very moment. He is a serf, now.” He paused to survey them carefully. “Or are we to change the ancient custom of London, and make this serf a citizen?”
Here even Bull could not argue. Ducket was a serf, no question. As for Silversleeves’s canny suggestion that they were changing London’s sacred customs – that had gone home.
The mayor spoke. “I’m sorry, Adam Ducket,” he said. “This is a bad business and you may not even be to blame. But we can’t have serfs as citizens. You must leave us.”
“What about my craft? I’m a fishmonger.”
“Oh, I’m afraid you’ll have to leave off that,” the mayor replied. “You’re not a citizen.”
As Barnikel and Mabel went out with him, Adam turned to them helplessly. “What am I to do?” he cried.
“We’ll help you,” Barnikel promised.
“But what about Lucy?” he asked.
And now Mabel, second mother though she might have been, spoke in the true voice of London.
“This is terrible, Adam,” she said sadly, “but we can’t have Lucy marrying you any more. You’re not a citizen.”
And so, after a very long wait indeed, Pentecost Silversleeves finally had his revenge.
1224
There was no doubt about it: things were getting better. As she surveyed the world around her in the seventy-fifth year of her robust life, Sister Mabel could not avoid feeling cheerful.
England was at peace. After continued strife between the barons and the king, John had suddenly died, leaving his son, only a boy, to rule with the help of a council. The council governed well. The great charter and its liberties had twice been confirmed. London had a mayor. If they had failed to avoid the tallage tax, the new administration, keeping out of foreign wars, had not needed to levy much money anyway. “We’re not even in trouble with the Pope at the moment,” she would cheerily add.
In London, too, there had been several recent improvements. The most striking, perhaps, was the great lantern tower that had just been completed above the nave of St Paul’s. Breaking the long, narrow line of the building, it added a new grace and dignity to a dark mass that had loomed over the western hill rather like a barn. But what had given Mabel even more pleasure in the last three years had been the arrival in the city of two new kinds of religious folk, unlike any that had been seen there before: the friars were busy building their modest lodgings at that very time; the followers of St Francis, the Franciscans or Greyfriars, and the Dominican Blackfriars.
“I like these friars,” Mabel would say. “They work.” The Franciscans, dedicated to personal poverty, cared for the poor. The Blackfriars were committed to teaching. The Greyfriars she especially liked. “Everything can be improved,” she would say. “So long as we all keep busy.” And it was no doubt with this in mind that she had undertaken her mission that day.
They were a strange couple, as they inched their way along. Mabel, solid and bustling, even if a little slower, and the stick-like figure who moved stiffly beside her, holding her arm.