Bath
The Year of Our Lord 1380
In the third year of the reign of Richard II
I married the brogger, Simon de la Pole, on the steps of St. Michael’s Without the Walls on a cool morning in late June with Geoffrey’s and Alyson’s disapproval ringing louder in my ears than the bloody church bells.
Despite all the promises I’d made, the exciting plans shored up, the intentions I’d held close, once I returned to Bath from Cologne, they fell by the wayside the moment Simon de la Pole appeared on my doorstep.
He’d made quite the impression at Mervyn’s funeral. Partly because something about him reminded me of Durand and the passions he’d aroused, and partly because he appeared to so swiftly forget me when I wasn’t looking at him. I was curious, inflamed, and determined to win his attention—a deadly combination.
For all that I’d been married three times, and enjoyed many trysts on my last pilgrimage, I wasn’t nearly as experienced with men as I liked to believe. I was, however, excellent at business and, I hoped, at managing my by now quite large household. I also thought I was a good friend, but short-sightedness, and refusing to hear what you don’t wish to hear, can make a poor one of the best of us.
This isn’t something I’d have recognized back then. It’s only now, as an old woman reflecting on my younger years, I understand how ignorant I was, how foolish, and also, how desperate to be loved.
That was my undoing—and not just with Simon.
When Geoffrey learned I was intending to marry Simon, he made it his mission to come to Bath and dissuade me. Luckily for him, the case Cecilia Champain brought against him hadn’t proceeded, in no small part due to the powerful men he had to testify on his behalf.
Geoffrey descended upon Slynge House in an uproar. I was hardly inclined to listen. As I said in the long letter from Cologne, and then shouted to his face, who was he to preach to me about poor choices when he carelessly shoved his prod in an unwed heifer? A heifer inclined to accuse him of a grievous crime? Simon, by contrast, wasn’t prepared to sard me until we were wed, and I was used goods and all.
When Alyson added her concerns to Geoffrey’s, I was about ready to box their ears and order the two of them from the house. Instead, as we raged at each other one night, I balled my fists and stood my ground. They could do their worst.
“Ask Mistress Ketch,” cried Alyson, half out of her chair, pointing toward the window. “She’ll tell you what he did to her daughter. What he did to their neighbors’ girls as well.”
“Who on God’s good earth is Mistress Ketch and why should I care about her, her daughter, or their bloody neighbors?”
“They’re farmers, that’s who, and those girls, who were virgins until your debaucher came a-knocking, are about to drop de la Pole lambs, aren’t they?”
“Who says they’re Simon’s?” I screeched.
“The girls!” yelled Alyson.
I’d no doubt the entire household could hear us. We stood feet apart in the solar, Geoffrey between us, Milda pretending to fold linens as we hollered and roared. I’d never seen Alyson so angry. Nay, angry is not the right word. Determined. Determined to have her say and make me listen. Alas, I was deaf to her entreaties. The fact Simon had fathered babes was confirmation his prick worked and I felt thrilled at the prospect he might fill me with child as well.
I was love-sick. Afflicted with a disease of the heart. Geoffrey called me cunt-dazed.
When rumors about Simon’s first wife dying from neglect reached us, I put it down to jealousy. Likewise when we heard a maid in Lady Frondwyn’s house had died giving birth to a child claimed to be his. A laundress at the Abbey said he’d forced himself upon her and was so shamed she threw herself in the river. She survived, but left Bath forthwith.
Next there’d be folk claiming he fathered the entire choir of St. Michael’s, or the tinker’s children who performed on market days. Stories about his womanizing reached such a point of absurdity, I closed my ears and instead chose to judge the man who paid court to me by his actions—toward me. The man who arrived dressed in his best clothes to escort me to church, the market, the pasture to see the flock, freely giving his advice about their fleeces, which he judged to be among the finest he’d seen (he was a brogger, after all). The man who never once tried to kiss my lips, or take advantage (God knows, I wanted him to), but treated me as if I were a princess, a virgin, and a martyr all rolled into one. He would admire my eyes, teeth, mouth, and body—not with his hands, lips, or tongue (though he told me oft how much he desired me—one look at his breeches and I knew this to be true), but with words.
I told Geoffrey he would do well to ape my lover’s words in his writing. I’d never seen Geoffrey look so hurt. “And you would expect me to ask a queen how to thread a loom just because she wears your cloth?”
That silenced me.
“Why rush, Eleanor?” he said eventually, his face red, his eyes pained. “Not so long ago you claimed you’d never marry again.”
“That was before Simon.”
“Seems that no sooner is one husband dead and gone, you find some other Christian man to take you on,” he whispered.
Picking up her sewing once more, Alyson raised her head. “Haven’t you heard, Master Geoffrey? Simon de la Pole is no Christian, he’s a Lollard.”
“Don’t you dare use that against him, Alyson,” I said. “Yesterday you were saying it was the only thing about him you approved of.”
“It is,” she said. “Doesn’t mean I approve of him, though.”
I clucked in annoyance. “Nowhere does God say there’s a limit to the number of husbands a woman can have.” I dared Geoffrey to challenge me.
He didn’t. I took it as a cue to continue.
“Where did the Lord command virginity? Tell me that, eh. On the contrary, He tells us to go forth and multiply. There’s no finite number of husbands for women, nor wives for men, so why not multiply them? It’s not as if I’m committing bigamy or adultery. My husbands are dead—may God assoil them. I love the Lord and my husbands equally. One in bed, the other in my heart and head.”
Geoffrey gave a weak smile. “That as may be, Eleanor, but St. Paul believes that one can only truly come to God if one remains chaste.”
“Of course, that’s something a priest would say. But how many priests do you know who are virgins? Ha!” I threw up my hands. “Answer me this, Poet. If seed is never sown, then how can fresh virgins be grown? Look,” I went and sat beside him, “I’ve nothing against virgins, as you and Alyson well know. You can quote all you like from St. Paul—who I reckon must have been a virgin to bleat about the state so—or Ptolemy or whoever, but it’s not like I can turn into one now, can I? That horse has bolted, the sheep’s been shorn, the gate’s been breached. I may as well tune my desires using the instrument of wedlock.”
I never admitted to them how much Simon’s courting filled an emptiness I hadn’t known existed until he reappeared with his pretty manners and even prettier words. Aye, it was flattery, good and true, and I needed to hear it. Like one of Geoffrey’s love-sick fools, I believed his every utterance, about his desire, my beauty, even while my little ivory mirror, which I’d bought at the Haymarket in Cologne, told me otherwise. Even as Simon declared his love, a tiny voice whispered warnings, told me to proceed cautiously. Between them, my inner demons, Geoffrey and Alyson and even Father Elias, my stubbornness was inflamed to greater acts of resistance. The more they objected, the closer I came to saying “aye” to Simon’s proposal. I was afraid that changing my mind now would be an act of weakness.
Too late, I learned it would have signified strength.
In the end it made no difference what anyone said or what stories I heard—or even what I saw with my own eyes. I made excuses for everything. I married Simon amid a crowd of the curious, the doubtful, and the concerned, and as soon as I could, I tore him away from our marriage feast and the attractive servant he was talking to, and brought him to my—nay, our—bedroom.
There, Simon de la Pole took me as his wife. For all I’d longed for this moment, it was but brief. Oh, his pole was de-la-lightful. Hard, his thrusts keen, but he barely kissed my mouth, he didn’t try to disrobe me, nor enjoy the flesh about which he’d rhapsodized so much over the months. He threw my skirts over my head, and pushed his way into my bower. Ready for him—as I had been for weeks—it was an easy entry and he was soon spent. I was just beginning, and wanting to be held and caressed until he was ready for round two. Instead, he leaped from the bed, pulled up his breeches, laced them, tidied his shirt and then, with a quick farewell, returned to the festivities downstairs.
I lay there staring at the ceiling wondering what in heaven’s name had just happened. Here I was, on my wedding night, alone, while my husband celebrated his marriage the way, so it turned out, he preferred to live: sans wife.
Sans me.