London - Edward Rutherfurd [203]
They were also called Ducket – except for the two sisters, whom fame had brought a new, professional name. So well known were they, and so associated with their particular whorehouse, that they were nowadays universally known as “the Dog’s Head girls”. Which had already started to lapse into another old English name not unlike the one they were born with: Dogget, they became. Some Duckets, a little embarrassed by their reputation did not mind this distancing of the name. The girls accepted it cheerfully. The Dogget sisters, therefore, they unashamedly were.
The Dogget sisters were a kind-hearted pair; but if there was one thing they loved best, it was an adventure. So when, two days before, they had come upon Joan in floods of tears outside St Paul’s, and made her tell them her story, they had been intrigued. “We must help her,” they said together. And whether it was Isobel who had suggested it to Margery, or the other way round, they had come up with the extraordinary plan that Joan was now following, and which, risky though it was, had been working so beautifully until this moment.
The only trouble was that for the last hour they had completely forgotten her. The problem lay with Margery.
“Does it hurt?” The two sisters had gone to a quiet place on the slopes a mile away from Bankside. Now they were gazing sadly at the little sore.
“It burns,” said Margery.
“That’s it, then,” said Isobel. “They’ll find it.” The bishop’s bailiff and his assistants inspected all the girls once a month. If they had any kind of disease, they were thrown out of the Liberty. Even a bribe was probably useless. For, most Londoners agreed, it was one of the advantages of the Church running the brothels that the bishop’s inspections were thorough. And Margery very clearly had the burning sickness.
It was a form of syphilis, though less severe than the strain which would appear in later centuries. When it had first come to Britain is uncertain; but, though the infection may have been brought by returning crusaders, there are clear indications of its presence on the island from as early as Saxon times.
But what could they do? If Margery were thrown out of the brothel, her livelihood would be gone.
“I wish,” she said, “that the king hadn’t thrown out all the Jews.”
If there was one thing that everyone on Bankside agreed upon, it was that the old Jewish doctor had been the best; and many Londoners had similar memories. For whether it was because they had better access to the ancient knowledge of the classical world and the Middle East, or whether they were simply better educated and less prone to superstition, it was true that the Jewish community had often provided the best physicians. The old Jewish doctor on Bankside had known how to treat the burning sickness with mercury; and now nobody did.
The Jewish community had completely disappeared. Ever since the anti-Jewish riots at King Richard’s coronation a century before, the bad feeling towards the Jews in England had been growing. This gradual process of persecution was not primarily caused by the community’s financial activities. For though it was true that some Church philosophers declared that the charging of interest was usury, and therefore a sin, this ignorance of elementary economics was not general, even in the Church. Bishop administrators and the abbots of great monasteries made extensive use of Jewish loans. Indeed, a huge rebuilding recently completed at Westminster Abbey had been financed in this way. To their amused astonishment, a group of Jewish financiers had once been offered the relics of a saint – which assured a profitable flow of pilgrims – as security for a loan.
But