Read by Gloria Sanders
Lauren Van Schaik’s short fiction has been shortlisted for the Galley Beggar Short Story Prize and The White Review Short Story Prize, published by the Cincinnati Review and performed by Liars’ League. She has an MA in Creative Writing from UEA and is working on a novel.
Gloria Sanders trained at Drama Studio London. She regularly narrates audiobooks for the RNIB and recently joined the cast of Time Will Tell’s Dracula at Whitby Abbey. She often works as an historical interpreter at heritage sites around the country and has continued her training in clowning and historic fooling. She recently qualified as a Spanish Interpreter.
In the year of dark and bleeding armpits, every living man I ever dallied with got in touch.
As 1348 waned, I arrived under my father’s roof in a donkey-cart just as the mistletoe was strung and the autumn-fat hogs slaughtered. I was once again fortuitously widowed. Once again pretending to weep into my Christmas peacock over my departed husband and boogying a country-dance alone in my bower. Poor imbecile Roger, run through with a pitchfork.
Last time I was bereaved, my father trebucheted me at his friends before I was out of mourning, arranging ham-fisted feasts where suitors inspected my teeth and heard me sing. These rot-gummed lords fretted about my “barrenness”, but we explained my dead husband Thomas was a man of infertile appetites and that I had the hips for birthing and old-fashioned fucking. Roger marched me altar-wards within months.
A year later, second husband lying chilly and draughty-bowelled in his family-vault, my father judged me an ill-omen for men. I get this a lot.
He swore this time he wouldn’t even marry me to Jesus Christ himself: besides, nunneries were a hotbed of female literacy and bosom-sisters. And Canterbury pilgrimages were worse; who knew what tales I’d hear on the journey?
I could barely contain my glee. Since I was twelve, my sheets crawled with men as with fleas. To have a spell without—I’d take up the lute. Learn Latin to see if what men say about the Bible is true (I suspect not). Launch a side-hustle in embroidered kerchiefs. I was on the cusp of 20 and embracing my spinster dotage.
But even as we celebrated the Lord’s birth, watching gaily-frocked mummers, and slip-sliding across the ice-crusted pond on horse-shins, a darker omen than a twice-widowed woman loomed. Ill-tidings rippled from London, dark portent with every letter, every touring band of monks. Rumours of noses and lips blackened, men’s groins running with pus, bodies piled like tinder—a curse upon mincing city-dwellers, my father declared. What did a Westminster-man know about the life of a Yorkshire lord? We didn’t share London’s sins, its faddish diet, its consorting with the French. Here, we were pious and thoroughly English, and it would protect us.
But when pestilence skulked into York in February, he flew into a tizzy, certain death lurked everywhere. He’d heard the illness spread on foul smells, so had bonfires of fragrant juniper lit in the great hall, until we sweated through our wool—a reek made worse by his prohibition on bathing. He smelled rankest of all, advised by his physician to douse himself in vinegar and urine.
Then he started sniffing out sin. Anyone with a whiff of disobedience—his harelipped second wife who had lately shirked her conjugal duties, his kennelmaster whose hounds howled when he approached—was herded into a confessional.
He looked upon me at breakfast one morning, setting down his potion of ale and ground emerald from my mother’s best necklace.
“At least you seem repentant, Joan.”
How little he knows.
*
March delivered a letter from Thomas’s sister Agnes, in fashionable Bedford. Scythed Death had thus far overlooked them, praise Jesus and their moat. But the havoc it had stirred among the living! The serfs ran amok, laying down their pitchforks, draining the ale-stores, demanding wages, puffing themselves up like lordlings. In France, men donned white hoods and whipped themselves (if only Thomas had lived to see it). We’d heard rustles of this ferment from travellers. Father took precautions against uprisings; our priest entertained the quarantine-idle with marathon readings of Scripture. He was also considering bear-baiting and tax-credits. But Agnes reported something troublingly new.
“You recall, before I wed William, I loved another, also William? I was planning our wedding until he entered the church. The career-opportunities were unmissable: perhaps even conferences in Rome. He said we didn’t have to break up, but I refused to be third-wheel to God. I was so melancholy I ate an entire pickled herring that day. Well, Joan, the now-Cardinal William, still in his scarlet vestments, appeared at the manor’s gates just yesterday, frantic to see me: muddy from the road, but handsome, with a mouthful of teeth. My husband refused him entry, so I slipped out at midnight…”
My father, sitting at the table’s head, slurped his doctor’s snakeskin soup loudly.
“He confessed that he regretted our parting daily,” Agnes resumed, “that the great mortality roiling this land had stirred sweet memories of us.” She transcribed a page of compliments, before concluding that she’d banished him without even a tumble. I sighed: Agnes was ever timid and bloodless.
But unease claimed me. It was one thing for pestilence to goad men into acts of faith, but lift the drawbridge if they’re being struck down with nostalgia; hearts kindled by memento mori or just desperation to get some before their balls blacken and fall off.
I paced before the pungent fire, clicking rosary-beads. “Hail Mary, full of grace.” What beasts would crawl from the crannies of my life? In these unprecedented times, just as I’d sworn off men.
I resolved that none should move me.
*
The wheelwright son’s Perkin was first. As I waded across the yard, through chickens and curs, he wrenched me by the elbow into a storeroom swinging with dried meats. He dropped to his knees and pressed his lips to my hem. “Joan, I am lower than a worm before you, but I’ve never forgotten our games.”
As romping children we’d playacted physician, leeching one another’s bared stomachs. Once I sliced into Perkin’s forearm, letting so much blood my heart leapt and he went shroud-white and swooned as maidens do. When he discovered these revels, my father had Perkin whipped.
Now a beanpole, with goatish whiskers, Perkin pressed my hand with his clammy one. “I’ll not go to the grave without confessing my feelings, sweet Joan. Here at the world’s end, it doesn’t matter I’m a wheelwright and you a noblewoman.”
I extracted myself from his grasp. “Remember yourself, Perkin.”
“Please, Joan. I think of you constantly,” he said—in a dripping, breathless way that made me think my father ought to cut off his right hand.
Throwing open the storeroom-door, I hurried away. He hollered after: “Joan, you Mary Magdalene. You literate slut!”
*
Next was Osbert, Father’s ward. We had a furtive, heart-swelling dalliance, and he divested me of my virginity. Then he decamped to Oxford, to read the swivelling stars. Mutual friends reported he’d fallen into dissolution and epic poetry there.
He arrived outside our gates, unsteady on his steed, eyes drifting. Worried that pestilence’s foul fog might be his companion, I addressed him from the ramparts, with a crossbow.
“What do you want, Ozzy?”
“Joan, my doe, my patron saint. How long has it been? I’m come to confess you haunt me. All others have been pale shadows of you.”
“Get a grip.” His academic robes were mud-crusted and tattered. He’d been travelling longer than the week’s journey from Oxford. “Seen these others lately, Oz?”
“Joan, might we converse over your father’s well-brewed ale? A braised pheasant?” He wiped his soggy brow.
I loosed an arrow, pinging the ground. Another zinged under his horse’s rearing hooves. My aim was never good. But he got the hint and galloped off.
*
Next Jack, a body-building serf of the late Roger. We’d had a liaison before my lamentable widowing: tumbles in the barley-fields, stolen moments behind tapestries, just outside of Roger’s (admittedly limited) sight. Hay threaded my hair for months.
Jack woke the household pummelling the doors before dawn, having stolen past both gates and guards. His brandished pitchfork gave my Father a fright. He turned whey-faced, thinking revolution upon us and lectured Jack volubly through the barred door about incremental change and how it’s much harder to be an anointed knight and massive landowner than Jack might think.
“The things I did for you, Joan!” Jack called despondently, before tramping back to his wife and however many remained of his thirteen kids.
*
As spring ripened into summer, the pestilence passed over our manor. But not the exes, still streaming to our gates like pus from a swollen groin, the punishment faith always promised for my promiscuity. First, Richard the troubadour with his cunning pipe. Years ago, when he’d departed for a tour of Scotland, I’d wept myself witless and wrote wretched verse (then burned it because no-one serious wrote in our vulgar English tongue).
“Joan is dead,” I made one of the maidservants inform him when his dulcet tunes chimed through my window. We all endured his mournful strumming late into night.
Next, Giovanni, the Italian priest my father once hosted. My first cousin Edward; his brother Edmund. “You carnal sorceress, Joan. You vixen!” they cried. My reply-note detailed which I preferred in bed, and things went rather Oasis from there.
Then, Henry, our noble neighbour’s heir. With his wife. “Joan, Griselda really likes your energy. Sup with us?”
One man even claimed to be Thomas, returned to his forlorn wife. But he couldn’t be because Thomas died two years ago, in his bedchamber, rope around his neck and apple in mouth. We swung the imposter.
Seemingly all England convulsed with regrets. Pilgrimages unmade, indulgences unbought, onions not pickled before the cooks ran away. Women not fucked one last time. The Book of Revelation forgot this part.
But was it so novel? Before Mother died in childbirth, she’d declared men always return, like a once-fed cat; like a prodigal son, inheritance blown on bedwarmers and ale. But like most of her advice, about sealing shut my legs, about penitence, it sieved from my head.
*
Then, Lemuel. Fucking finally. Petitioning the gates, handsome as I’d conjured him in bed nightly, even when Thomas panted behind me; especially when Roger snored. So hale, so rakish—you’d think the world wasn’t being ripped asunder, bodies unburied in the streets, angels hoisting apocalyptic horns.
“Hey,” he says, and I plumb forget the forsaking-all-men thing. It takes everything not to fling myself into his arms, not to push his fingers into my mouth. Play it cool, Joan.
“Hey yourself,” I say.
I smuggle Lemuel straight to my bedchamber. Thank God half the servants decamped for doomsday cults and Father banished the rest for continuing to bathe. No-one waylays us.
Door barred, he eyes the tumult of my bower: all two of my dresses thrown over the floor, candles a pale, straggling army across the flagstones, bed-linens tousled. We’re suddenly embarrassed, cannot meet eyes.
“Strange times,” he says.
“Yeah, this year has been weird.”
Backstory on Lemuel: He’s heir to a Grade I-listed castle nearby and years ago, pre-marriages, we were on and off. Falling into haystacks, lying under apple-trees; drinking flagons of wine and talking all night about Purgatory and fornicating. Then suddenly, he married a woman who reminded him of the Virgin Mary and clove my heart as with lightning. Shortly after, I hurled myself onto Thomas as onto a sword.
Lemuel sent missives over the years. From the candlewax spatter and chicken-scratch of his handwriting, they’d been written late at night. “Hey,” they’d start, then continue with promises of sending his wife to a nunnery. He’d really do it this time. Unfortunately, by the time his letter arrived and I dispatched our manservant with my response, Lem’s wits, and recollection of the Ten Commandments, were always fully restored.
But that’s forgotten; he’s here now in the flesh. The flesh rampant: we paw each other, rend garments, get it on.
“You were ever the devil on my shoulder, Joan. My Lilith and my Delilah. My ruin!”
Pan to the tapestries, if you will.
*
I wake late, the sun running like yolk through the arrow-slits, Lemuel drowsing beside me. Maybe the Danse Macabre will reel off everyone but us and we’ll live in a carnal New Jerusalem alone. At the least, hopefully the scythe’s already swung for his wife.
I gaze at him fondly, brush a sweat-curled lock from his forehead. I could lie abed with him forever, only rising to fetch bread and wine, to pee after sex. I settle onto the goosedown again but my ankle itches. I scratch it; scratch again. I draw it from beneath the sheets; fresh bites ring my calf.
Never mind: what’s a nibble? Richard once tupped me in stinging-nettles—the places I itched you wouldn’t believe. I snuggle against Lem. Even fleas cannot blemish our Heaven.
(c) Lauren Van Schaik, 2021
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