London - Edward Rutherfurd [238]
“I’m grateful to you for bearing me in mind,” he said quietly. “And should I need you, I will send for you. Good day.”
Some time later, as his family crowded round him to ask how the interview had gone, young James Bull, his honest blue eyes only slightly puzzled, replied:
“I’m not sure. But I think it went rather well.”
Geoffrey Ducket liked his master Fleming and the grocery business. Chaucer had persuaded Bull to settle a small amount of money on the boy, which he promised to give him when he had completed his apprenticeship. “Then,” Chaucer explained, “Fleming will either let you take over, or you can start up on your own.”
It was only recently that the ancient Company of Pepperers, who dealt in spices, had merged with a group of general wholesalers who, since they sold in gross quantities, were known as the “grossers”. The new Grocers Guild was large and powerful. They and the Fishmongers vied with the Wool and Cloth Guilds for the city’s greatest offices. But of all its many members, few were more modest than John Fleming.
He had a little stall in the West Cheap, by Honey Lane, though he kept his goods in a storehouse behind the George. Every morning he and Ducket would leave Southwark and push their brightly painted handcart across London Bridge. And when the bell of Mary-le-Bow signalled the end of trading, they would return and Ducket would lock their modest takings in a little strongbox he kept under the floor of the store.
Ducket loved the store. Before long he could go round it with his eyes shut and, opening any sack or box, tell by the smell what it contained. There was the sweet smell of nutmeg, the rich aroma of cinnamon. There were saffron and cloves, sage, rosemary, garlic and thyme. There were hazelnuts and walnuts, chestnuts in season, there was salt from the salt beds on the east coast, dried fruit from Kent. And of course, there were the little sacks of black peppercorns, the most valuable commodity in the grocer’s trade. “All the way from the Orient, by way of Venice,” Fleming would say. “This is the grocer’s gold dust, young Geoffrey Ducket. Purest gold.” And his eyes would take on a faraway look.
Fleming was scrupulous. He would weigh every item with the utmost care on the little scales he kept on the stall. “I’ve never been taken to the Pie-Powder court in my life,” he would say of the little court where the city authorities dealt with complaints in the market each day. He had never sold short measure by so much as a clove.
Once, soon after Ducket’s apprenticeship began, a fellow was found guilty of selling stale fish. He and his master watched as he was led along the Cheap on a horse with two bailiffs carrying a basket of fish behind him. At the end of the Poultry, opposite Cornhill, stood the wooden stocks. A heavy wooden yoke was put across the man’s neck and then, as he stood immobilized, they burned the fish under his nose and left him there for an hour before releasing him. “It doesn’t seem so terrible, does it?” Ducket remarked. But Fleming gazed at him with his thin, sad face and shook his head.
“Think of the shame,” he said. And then, very quietly: “If they’d done that to me, I would have died.”
Ducket soon discovered another peculiarity of his master. Though Fleming did not possess any books of his own, and would anyway have struggled with the Latin or French in which they were all written, he had a fascination with all forms of learning and would seek out those who had it and do his best to engage them in conversation. “Time spent with a man of learning is never wasted,” he would say earnestly. And if Ducket’s godfather Chaucer were mentioned, he would declare: “There’s a distinguished man. Go to see him whenever you can.”
The George was one of over a dozen inns on the main street of Southwark known as the Borough. It lay on the east side near the Tabard. And though the bishop’s brothels were not far away on Bankside, the George, like the other inns,