London - Edward Rutherfurd [230]
Yet who exactly was he? It was kindly young Chaucer who had discovered the baby’s identity a few days after he was found. “I asked around,” he told Bull, “and it seems the neighbours found him in a tenement where a poor family called Ducket had all died of plague. A miracle he lived, really. They left him by the bridge to be picked up, just as we thought.” More puzzling had been the baby’s first name. Since no child could enter heaven unbaptized, and since infant mortality was high, babies were usually christened quickly after birth. “I asked at all the local churches,” Chaucer reported. “But not a thing.” And when they wondered what to do, he grinned. “Call him Geoffrey,” he said. “I’ll be his godfather.”
When he was three – this was the custom – the boy had been confirmed into the Church. After that, he had not seen much of his godfather for some years, since Chaucer was often away. Yet even if he was only a foundling, without a real family, his childhood was happy. Bull was always scrupulously fair and his wife, in her quiet way, was prepared to act as a somewhat distant mother. Indeed, only one thing worried him.
He was odd. There was a funny white patch in his hair which people stared at. Worse, the curious webbing of skin between his fingers appeared to be strange as well. Often, he would look surreptitiously at people’s hands to see if they had this webbing too. But they never had. Once he had discovered that the cook’s assistant, a fat girl who seldom spoke, was also called Ducket, and he had asked her eagerly, “Are you of my family?” But she had only munched a ginger cake and finally told him: “I dunno.”
Gilbert Bull’s house stood near the middle of London Bridge on the upstream side. It was four storeys high with a tall, steep tiled roof. It was constructed of timber and plaster and, like many of the better houses now, its dark oak beams were elaborately carved. A dozen curious little gargoyles of human or animal faces peeped down cheerfully from overhanging corners into the busy street. The ground floor contained a counting house. On the main upper floor, a splendid solar, a living room with a large fireplace and chimney looked out over the river. The top half of its big window was filled with tiny panes of greenish glass. Coal burned in the fireplace. Known as sea coal since it was brought from the north by ship, it gave more heat and smoked less than timber. Above this floor were bedroom chambers, and above those, the attics. The cook slept in the kitchen on the ground floor; little Geoffrey Ducket, the servants and the apprentices, in the attic.
But the busy kitchen was his favourite place; the great spit by the fire which was always lit; the blackened old iron kettle; the huge wooden vat of water, filled from a bucket lowered into the sparkling Thames each morning; the leather tank of live fish from which the cook would make her selection; the heavy pot of honey she used for sweetening; the pickling tub and the spice cupboard where he would go to open the jars and sniff the aromas.
Still more amusing, once a month, was to watch the women do the laundry. A big wooden trough was placed in the middle of the kitchen floor, filled with hot water, caustic soda and wood ashes, and linen shirts and sheets were soaked, pounded, rinsed and then run again and again through a mangle until they were stiff as a board. The cook showed him how to clean fur as well. “This is the fluid I use,” she explained. “I take wine, and fuller’s earth.” She used to let him sniff this and he would start and jerk back his head at the pungent smell of ammonia. “Then I mix in some juice from green grapes. And, you see, every stain comes out.”
He would hang about by the kitchen doorway to watch the pedlars coming by with their wares just after the service of terce in the morning. And for special amusement, from the little courtyard where they lowered the bucket into the river, he would throw sticks down into the Thames and then rush dangerously across the crowded thoroughfare and into another yard where he would try to