• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 3737 0

which Tiffany and Ducket took over, and went to live at his childhood home, where he remained. His affair with Sister Olive had lasted eight years and had been an unqualified success. Given her convenient and sensual availability, his desire for the rigours of matrimony soon left him. As he saw his merry grandchildren, he could not fail to be taken with them; and his family pride was somewhat mollified when it was pointed out to him, by one of the heralds at the College of Arms, that since Ducket had his own arms, and Tiffany was, as he put it, an armorial heiress, the arms of Bull and Ducket could be joined, leaving Bull at least a heraldic immortality for future generations. As he looked out from Bocton across the glorious sweep of the Weald of Kent, it seemed to Bull that the years of his retirement were bathed in a soft and gentle light.

Yet, before he found final rest, some shadows were to cross even this pleasant landscape.

Despite its early promise, the reign of young Richard II had ended badly. Many at court felt that the young man’s brave success at the time of the Peasants’ Revolt had gone to his head. Whatever his courage, he had shown none of the Black Prince’s ability as a commander. Wildly extravagant, some of his ideas, like the handsome new roof for Westminster Hall, were admired; others, like his reckless spending on his favourites, were not. And suddenly, shortly before the century’s end, his behaviour had become so erratic that, after a huge row over his feudal inheritance, John of Gaunt’s son Henry had taken up arms and deposed him.

Henry IV, of the House of Lancaster, as his branch of the royal family was called, had governed well. But the business had offended Bull’s sense of propriety all the same. The new king had usurped another’s rightful place. The order of the universe had been disrupted. “In the long run,” he warned his family, “it will lead to trouble.”

A deeper shadow had come a year later, in 1400.

Plague. It had returned to London in the summer. Despite their protests, Bull carried his family to Bocton. There on the high ridge, just as when he was a youth, he had waited until it was past. Only when he was sure it was safe, in late October, did he venture back with them to London. To find that the darkness, once again, had taken from him one he loved.

Chaucer had found a pleasant little house for his retirement, at Westminster, just between the palace and the Abbey with a charming walled garden all around. He had only been there a year, working on his Canterbury Tales when, quite suddenly, in that summer of the plague, his life was snuffed out.

“Why didn’t I think of him? Why didn’t I bring him to Bocton?” Bull cried in misery. Though when he went to the house, it was not clear to him whether his friend had died of the plague or of something else. The gardener said plague; the monks said not.

“But I can promise you this,” one monk assured him, “he made a good death. He repented of all his works at the end, you know. Impious and ungodly, those tales were. He said we should burn them all,” he added with satisfaction.

“Did you?” Bull asked.

“Those we could find,” the monk replied.

Could his friend, Bull wondered, in the last extremities of pain, have cried out such a thing? Who knew? But as he considered Chaucer’s huge and panoramic work, unfinished at his death and so hopelessly, so mistakenly, in English, it hardly seemed to him to matter.

“It will all be lost or forgotten anyway,” he said sadly as he left the house.

The bells were tolling for vespers as he was led back through the Abbey. “Would you like to see his grave?” the monk kindly enquired, and led him to the place.

“I’m glad, at least, he is buried in the Abbey,” Bull said. “He was an ornament to England. I’m pleased to see you recognized it.”

But the monk shook his head.

“You misunderstand, sir,” he explained. “He is here because of his house.” He smiled. “He was an Abbey tenant, you see.”

Bull died five years after that and Bocton came to Tiffany. She went there more often than Ducket, though he too came to love