Belle's Song (29 page)

I hope I haven’t done that. Just as the summoner was not completely a crook, so the Master, Walter, and I were not heroes. Only Luke, perhaps, deserved that epithet because he was the only one of us who didn’t lie. And my father, of course. And the widow.

I kept Walter’s secret; at least I didn’t tell Luke in so many words. I know he guessed part of it on our wedding night. You’ll know how. Not that he said anything directly. It was just that when Walter came a few weeks
later to tell us he was going on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, Luke embraced him very warmly. I saw Walter close his eyes as Luke held him, and I knew just what he was feeling.

He brought Dulcie for me. His sister, he told us, had never returned, but he hoped the visit to Jerusalem might help. One bit of good news, he said brightly. His father had lined up a girl for him to marry when he got back. I knew, at that moment, that Walter would never come back. He was not capable of perpetrating such a deceit. Before he left, we had an afternoon alone together, just talking and remembering, and I cut a lock of his hair. I thought my heart would break when he rode off and Luke never reproached me for my torrent of tears. I still think of him every day. Sometimes, when I walk, I pretend he’s beside me. You see, I didn’t really lie about that in the courtroom. Walter’s my other love, and the only person, apart from you, my reader, who knows everything that happened.

The king’s story, of course, is well known. His triumphant entry into London was a momentary flicker that came to nothing. In the end, just as Master Chaucer feared, he was deposed and probably starved to death. I sometimes remember him in my prayers. Like most of us, he was a mixture of good and bad, but if you’re king, that’s not what counts. Richard wasn’t canny. That was his downfall.

For a few years, there was an annual pilgrimage reunion party at the Tabard, instigated by Dame Alison. Sometimes those reunions prosper, sometimes not. Ours didn’t. Memories of that courtroom killed it. After a while I heard news of the pilgrims only occasionally; a death usually, or a faint scandal.

Master Chaucer was a firm and faithful friend. He came to Southwark regularly until he was made clerk of the king’s works and became too busy. Though I missed him, the appointment pleased me. It showed that he still had the king’s favor. Sadly, he never completed his tales, and when, about a year after King Richard was deposed, the Master died and his son Thomas, acting as executor, offered them to me to finish, I declined. I had my own memories of the pilgrimage and didn’t want to muddy them. However, the Master’s death did spur me to make this record, although now I’ve finished it, I’m nervous. To this day, just as I’ve never told Luke the whole truth about Walter, so I’ve never told him the whole truth about the Master. Even though he understands and forgives all my faults, and I doubt he’d hold an unwilling conspiracy against the man who brought us together, I think the revelation would disappoint him. Perhaps I’ll let him read this, perhaps not.

You may want to know what happened to the summoner. I’ve no idea. Nothing, I expect. Only in stories do the wicked get their just deserts.

There’s nothing left to say now except that I love Luke with all my soul, and he loves me, and that the more I think about it, the more our love seems the miracle of this tale. That I, with all my imperfections and compulsions, should find my best peace in the gray eyes of a boy I only met properly because he spoke before I’d counted to three, needs more than luck. Perhaps God was at work. Perhaps St. Thomas. I don’t know. Sometimes I feel I should care. Other times, I just sit with the lock of Walter’s hair around my neck, counting my blessings in the litany of the bells. Luke remembers all their names, together with their weights and volumes. He laughs now when he thinks of the time he wanted to be a writer, though he never thinks it was a waste. “It brought me to you,” he says when we’re lying together, and the way he says it almost stops my heart.

I live an ordinary life these days, with no more life-in-the-head. I don’t need it. My love makes the ordinary extraordinary, and, as Walter might say, that’s the loveliest kind of love. Dear Walter. Dearer than dear. As I lay down my quill, I hope that wherever you are, either in heaven or on earth, you’re happy.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

In the English-speaking world, we are taught that Chaucer (c. 1342–1400) is the father of English literature. His
Canterbury Tales
are staples of the school curriculum. But let’s be honest: many readers’ hearts sink a little as they contemplate even the beautifully bawdy “Miller’s Tale” in the original Middle English. Somehow, having to look up every other word in a glossary strips Chaucer’s stories of all the pleasure we’re assured we’ll find in them. Even so, at my convent school I remember being entranced by an erudite and very serious-minded nun reading “The Franklin’s Tale” aloud and with unexpected feeling. As we, like Dorigen, contemplated those “grisly rokkes blake,” the barrier of the language evaporated. But more than that, I suddenly realized it’s not Chaucer who’s dull, it’s certain ways of teaching him.

If you really want to enjoy Chaucer, remember four things: first, you’re allowed to laugh—he’s very naughty and very sly; second, if he were alive today, he’d be writing for comic soap operas, some to be shown only when children are in bed; third, the way he pokes fun at clerics and pompous officials means he’s not just the father of English literature, but also the father of stand-up
comedians; and fourth, father of English literature or not, he led a rowdy life that outdoes anything he actually wrote.

It was, indeed, more his life than his tales that inspired
Belle’s Song
. All Chaucer biographies will tell you he was an author, poet (I quote some of his poetry in my story), philosopher, bureaucrat, deputy forester, member of Parliament, comptroller of customs, clerk of the king’s works, courtier, and diplomat. Not all will tell you that he was a spy—euphemistically referred to as “working for the king”—and possibly a criminal too—in 1380 he was cited in an “incident” against a woman. Gloomy scholars seem to want the father of English literature to be a saintly man with an unblemished reputation, not a real man of his time, with a wart or two to his name.

Yet hurrah for the warts because they turn Chaucer from an author of stories into a character in
Belle’s Song
, and when you add to Chaucer’s own warts the grisliness of the fourteenth century with the plague, England’s peasants revolting, and King Richard II not being able to cut the mustard, as we British say, I felt the same kind of stirring as Chaucer himself must have felt as he prepared his vellum for his magnum opus. There are, of course, many differences between Chaucer and myself, but my favorite is that I finished my book and he never finished his …

SELECTED TIMELINE

ALSO BY K. M. GRANT

The de Granville Trilogy
Blood Red Horse
Green Jasper
Blaze of Silver

How the Hangman Lost His Heart

The Perfect Fire Trilogy
Blue Flame
White Heat
Paradise Red

Copyright © 2010 by K. M. Grant
Electronic edition published in November 2011

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Originally published in Great Britain by Quercus Books in 2010
First published in the United States of America in November 2011
by Walker Publishing Company, Inc., a division of Bloomsbury Publishing, Inc.
www.bloomsburyteens.com

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to
Permissions, Walker BFYR, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10010

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Grant, K. M. (Katie M.)
Belle’s song / by K.M. Grant.—1st ed.
p. cm.

Summary: In 1387, fifteen-year-old Belle joins Geoffrey Chaucer, his scribe Luke, squire
Walter, and others on a pilgrimage from London to Canterbury to atone and pray for a cure
for her father’s crippling injury, but political intrigue threatens them all.
ISBN 9780802722768
[1. Pilgrims and pilgrimages—Fiction. 2. Voyages and travels—Fiction. 3. Knights and
knighthood—Fiction. 4. Chaucer, Geoffrey, d. 1400—Fiction. 5. Middle Ages—Fiction.
6. Great Britain—History—Richard II, 1377–1399—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.G7667755Bel 2011      [Fic]—dc22         2010038026

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Contents

Dedication

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

Author’s Note

Selected Timeline

Also By K. M. Grant

Imprint