London - Edward Rutherfurd [231]
But the best times of all were spent with his hero.
There were usually apprentices in the house, friendly, but too busy to take much notice of the little foundling in the kitchen. Except for one. A decade older than Ducket, with curly brown hair, brown eyes, a devil-may-care attitude coupled with a kindly charm, to the boy he seemed a god. The younger son of a rich old gentry family from the West Country, his father had sent him to join the merchant élite of London. As the cook would say with approval: “That’s a real young gentleman.” But Richard Whittington was still an apprentice. In the old days, rich men or the sons of citizens bought or inherited their citizenship. Now they almost always obtained it through the guilds. They had always set the standards, quality, working conditions and prices, trade by trade. No craftsman or merchant could operate without guild membership. But nowadays the guilds dominated the wards, the common council and the inner council of aldermen. From the humblest craft guilds to the great merchant guilds like the Mercers who vied with each other for control of the city’s politics, the guilds were London.
Whittington liked little Ducket. The foundling had such a cheerful spirit that the apprentice often played with him. He taught him to wrestle and box and soon discovered something else: “no matter how often he goes down, he gets back up again,” he said approvingly. “He never gives up.”
Sometimes he would show him the city. The plague might have made gashes in the population, but London still seemed to be bursting with life. And everything was such a wonderful jumble. They would dive into an alley and find some great nobleman’s house, with his coat-of-arms fluttering on a silken banner from the windows, while to left and right clustered the hanging wooden signs of bakers, glove-makers and taverns. Even the house of the Black Prince himself was in a street full of fishmongers, and great wicker baskets of herbs hung by his gate, to lessen the smell. Rich, middling and poor jostled side by side; so did the sacred and the profane. The great walled enclosure of St Paul’s might set the cathedral apart; but by the little church of St Lawrence Silversleeves, the surrounding tenements, which had been emptied by the Black Death, had collapsed and their yard had been turned into a midden where poor folk went to relieve themselves – and whose resulting stench obliged the curate to keep a handkerchief before his face as he hurried through the services.
Once they made a longer expedition. This was to find the origin of the city’s fresh water supply.
Since the tidal Thames was often salty, it was not always good for drinking. Once, the Londoners had used the little Walbrook or the nearby Fleet; but neither of these was wholesome. Apart from the discarded pelts from the skinners’ workshops, there were too many houses with garderobes hanging over its narrow stream to make the Walbrook pleasant; as for the Fleet, it was a dirty river now. Upstream lay the tanneries where leather was cured and whose effluent made the Fleet stink of urine and ammonia. Then, by Seacoal Lane, the coal barges unloaded, and their dust darkened the water. At Newgate, butchers from the shambles would come out and empty offal and entrails into the stream. By the time the Fleet passed the watermill which stood at its junction with the Thames, it was not a pretty sight.
So in the middle of the West Cheap stood a curious building, shaped like a miniature castle tower; from its sides, through narrow pipes of lead, came constant streams of clear fresh water, brought there by a little aqueduct. It was known as the Great Conduit. Whittington and the boy followed the line of the pipes one Sunday afternoon all the way across to the sparkling spring which fed it, on a slope just north of Westminster, two miles away.
But if, to the boy, these were marvels, they did not seem to satisfy his hero at all.
“Disgusting,” he would say of a place like St Lawrence Silversleeves.