PROLOGUE

IT WAS NOT LONG AFTER CANDLEMAS IN the Year of Our Saviour 1362, when I was writing down the cost of pickled fish and flour and thinking them too high, that a Voice came into the inner ear of my mind. Margaret, it said, I did not so order the world that you would learn letters to waste them on account rolls. How much better if your accounting was of My glorious works.

“But Lord,” I answered, “You have commanded that wives serve their husbands, and my lord husband hates keeping household accounts.”

Margaret, how do you know that you won’t be serving him better by hiring a clerk for the accounts?

“Full time? Lord, think of the expense. And suppose he’s a rogue?”

Have your steward tell him what to write, then you can review it once a month, as Master Wengrave across the alley does to his great satisfaction.

“But, Lord, You know what happened last time I hired a clerk to write for me.”

Why don’t you leave Me to arrange things My own way on occasion, Margaret?

Now who am I, a sinful mortal being, to disobey Our Lord, who is so much higher than everyone, even husbands and other men? So I corked up the inkwell and put down the quill and looked out the window of the solar, where cold February rain was streaking the glass, at the tall, brightly painted houses of the merchants and vintners across the street, which looked all knobby on account of the many little windowpanes being round and bubbly. It is good to be rich and looking out of glass, I thought, watching two heavily bundled men taking a dray full of wood into the courtyard of Master Barton the Pepperer’s big stone house across the way. There was a time once when I’d have been dodging between those icy drops, intent on the business of making a living. But here a glowing brazier chased the chill from the chamber, and bright tapestries mocked the gray outside. Below me in the hall, I could hear the thumping and banging of the trestle tables being set up for dinner, and the smell of pickled cabbage and salt fish cooking came sneaking up through the joints in the door like a cat on the prowl. Then there came a knock at the door, not loud, but persistent, accompanied by a distressful cry.

“Mama, Mama, come quick. Father is having another fit and says he is going to run away to a monastery, where at least he’ll be left in peace to contemplate his sins.”

“Alison!” I said, running to the door, “whatever did you do to set him off? You know he’s working so terribly hard these days. Next month he travels to Kenilworth, and the presentation copy has to be ready.”

“It wasn’t me, Mama,” said Alison, standing framed in the doorway, her face pious. “It was Caesar who ate his pen case.”

“I told you never to let that puppy into his office,” I said, speeding down the narrow stairway with Alison behind me.

“Margaret,” said my lord husband, standing confused between the gangling hound and the children, “this is absolutely unbearable. Do something!” His office was a chaos, the straw on the floor all heaped and scooped as if someone had been digging in it, the ironbound chests thrown open to reveal piles of tumbled manuscripts and books marked at various important places with an oat straw. There were ink bottles and a quire of paper piled helter-skelter atop the double-locked steel box that held the rents and the remainder of the eighty gold moutons he had brought home from Burgundy. There were ink stains on his old ankle-length wool surcoat, and his liripipe, wound round his head like a Turk’s turban against the chill, had gone askew with all his heavy thinking, tilting precariously over one dark eyebrow. “I can’t get a thing done here, not a thing!” he said, managing to look damaged and irritated all at once. And yet beneath it, I could see he was secretly pleased with all the muddle, with a house with many children, blazing with life and joy and troubles, so different from the cold, grim manor house of his childhood, the blood and death in foreign places he had just left behind him. His brown eyes lit up as he spied me, and the tiniest little smile flitted across his face as he looked down at the top of my head. He is very tall and handsome, my lord husband, with his long Norman nose and dark curly hair, and our hearts can speak together when our lips are silent. Just now his heart was saying, Margaret, I was dull and sad here, working on a rainy day, and I needed a little chaos, and to see you, to make it right.

“My lord,” I said, “you have too many worries and burdens. Why don’t you hire a copy clerk to help you put together this work?”

“But, my cher Margaret, dear heart, what of the cost?” I could see his mind already working over the excellence of the idea. A good lad to carry his books behind him when he came from the illuminators, to copy his notes in a fair hand, to run and buy that extra bottle of ink or sharpen more quills. It seemed perfect.

“If he did the household accounts as well, the cost of his keep might be considered a reasonable expense,” I answered.

In this way Robert le Clerc, who failed in his University studies from rioting and roistering in taverns came to eat at our table, and God’s commands were obeyed, and my paper left off midway in the accounting of money and instead was given over to the accounting of the mysteries that are concealed in creation, and how, through fate, I became entangled with one of the strangest of all.

• 4 children’s caps of best wolle, 3d. each

• 1 barrel of pickled sturgeon, £3

• 3 bushels of wheaten flour, 18d. each, from Piers the Miller, who has cheated in the measure again

IN THE YEAR OF OUR LORD 1360, I, Margaret de Vilers, widowed and married too often for respectability, having returned from adventures abroad with several excellent pilgrims’ badges and my current husband, thought to leave adventuring alone. The whole world was then at war, our King having gone forth to Rheims to claim by force of arms the Sainte Ampoule of Holy Chrism that was brought to earth by a dove to anoint French kings, and with it to anoint himself and thus take hold of the crown of France. The French already had a perfectly good king, who was living in state in the Tower of London, having failed to provide the extremely large ransom his kingly dignity required. So it seemed a promising moment, you understand, and our King decided he must go, and where the King must go, so must the Duke, and where the Duke must, so must his chronicler, my lord husband, Sir Gilbert de Vilers, youngest and most eccentric of the distinguished but impoverished old family into which I married after a most brief period of widowhood. In the words of my former husband, Master Roger Kendall, who was a Master of the Company of Mercers of London and very rich if rather old, “When you think of wars and high talk, Margaret, remember it’s all really a matter of money. Everything usually is.” So that is what I think was at the bottom of everything, even if everyone else does think it was all about a jug of ointment in a foreign church. So that is where my story begins, with a war, and all the warriors of England gone abroad in search of fortune. And it all goes to show that even if you hide peacefully at home, adventure will come and find you anyway if that is how God wants it.