Generations of schoolchildren had reason to be grateful to Nevill Coghill and now so was Peter Diamond. Here was the Wife in language he could understand and enjoy, with some mild bawdiness thrown in regarding her ‘chamber of Venus,’ the pleasures of love-making and the demands she made in bed. Fair enough, he thought, this isn’t roll-in-the-aisles stuff, but it does the job with style and zip, written in rhyming verse that apparently uses the same metre as the original.
The General Prologue gave him some background. Alison was a bold-faced, healthy-looking character who queened it over all the other women in her parish, insisting on being first to make the offering in church and furious if anyone challenged her right.
This he found easy to believe.
She spun her own clothes and dressed on Sundays in a flowing cloak, red, tight-gartered stockings and tightly laced shoes, and a hat as large as a shield and weighing as much as ten pounds. He could understand Paloma’s delight in dressing an actress like that. Upon her amblere — which he discovered was an ambling horse — the wife was a much-travelled pilgrim. Impressively for a fourteenth century woman, she’d been to Jerusalem three times and other religious sites in France and Italy. She was chatty and quick to laugh, displaying a gap in her teeth which was said to be a sure sign of a lustful nature.
Cue the five husbands.
He turned to the Wife of Bath’s Prologue for her own account — and what an extraordinary piece of self-justification it was, running to thousands of words. After wading through all the Biblical arguments for serial marriage (King Solomon’s thousand wives among them), he learned that three of the husbands had been good, the others bad. The first three — the good ones — were rich and old, but were given a hard time once they married her, required to be energetic lovers and regularly scolded and put in the wrong, accused of being drunk and unfaithful, ‘innocent as they were’. Presumably they died of exhaustion.
Husband number four, a younger man, made the mistake of having a mistress. The wife got her own back by ‘frying him in his own grease’ and flirting with others, making him jealous. When she returned from her pilgrimage to Jerusalem, he died and she was glad to see him buried.
She was still a lively forty when she married for the fifth time — to a handsome twenty-year-old called John, whom she had been ‘toying and dallying’ with while husband four was in London during Lent. ‘I think I loved him best, I’ll tell no lie.’ She’d been turned on by the sight of his sturdy legs at her latest husband’s funeral. They married inside a month and she handed over all the land and property she’d inherited from the earlier marriages. But there was an early crisis. With lamentable want of tact for a newlywed, Johnny made it his habit to read to her about the misdeeds of all the wicked women of history from Eve onwards. One evening Alison was so enraged by this that she grabbed the book and ripped three pages from it and hit him in the face, causing him to fall back into the fire. He got up and struck her so hard that she became permanently deaf. But she made him pay dearly. At first she alarmed him by pretending she was at the point of death. He begged her to forgive him and promised never to hit her again. For good measure she smacked his face a second time and said they were now even. But she’d won the prize of sovereignty. She made him burn the book. In future she ruled the roost in the marriage. She became kindness personified, faithful and loving, and so, she insisted, was Johnny.
Diamond’s reading was done. He couldn’t say he was enchanted by Alison, but her spirit was undeniable. She had come alive for him, a recognizable human being from seven centuries ago. Anyone reading her life history would warm to the robust humour and her brand of feminism. Whatever you thought about her, she wasn’t repressed. You had to feel sorry for the men in her life.
Reading about her had helped him by sharpening and enlivening the impression of the character he remembered faintly from his schooldays. Without doubt she was the leading lady in The Canterbury Tales and it was possible to understand how she must have figured strongly in the thoughts of John Gildersleeve, whose entire career was founded on Chaucer’s work. Alison would have been very real to him. The chance to possess the stone carving had obviously excited him. And so Gildersleeve had become one more man to fall under the influence of the Wife of Bath, one more who ultimately perished.
Job done, his eyelids getting heavier, Diamond became as drowsy as the cat. Images of a stout, gap-toothed woman in an enormous hat drifted into his brain. She was sitting in his chair at Manvers Street leading a case conference, her red-shoed feet on the desk. Her amblere was tethered to the radiator, feeding from a nosebag, and no one seemed bothered by it.
He was next aware of the cat’s claws pricking his thighs. The doorbell was ringing. Raffles, startled, had just leapt from his lap. Clearly they had both been dozing. How long, he was unsure.
He heaved himself out of the chair and jammed his feet into the flip-flops he wore around the house. He still ached from the fall in his office the day before. He shuffled to the door, muttering about people who came calling in the evening. If it was a local politician he’d tell them what they could do with their policies.
Ingeborg was standing there, hands open in apology. This wasn’t her usual confident manner.
‘I know I should have phoned, guv.’
‘You’d better come in. Something the matter?’
‘No, I just thought this is the best way to see you away from the office.’
‘Coffee?’
‘No, thanks.’
He showed her into the living room. Raffles had already returned to the warm armchair and was staring at Ingeborg in the way only a cat can, daring her to eject him. She chose another chair.
And so did Diamond.
‘What’s on your mind?’
‘Am I right in thinking you’d like me to go undercover?’
‘Someone been talking to you?’ he said, thinking Halliwell must already have called her at home.
She shook her head. ‘I’m the obvious candidate, aren’t I? You only have to look at the rest of the team.’
He shifted in the chair, unsure where this was leading.
‘But you haven’t actually asked me.’
‘It’s a dangerous job,’ he said. ‘I’d rather have a volunteer. I’m not ordering anyone to take it on.’
‘You definitely need one of us to get among the hard men.’
He was fully awake now, alert to what she was saying. ‘That’s true. They’re hard men, all right. Professionals. Admittedly they made a hash of the robbery, but they were carrying guns. We must find out who put them up to it.’
‘But who are they?’ Ingeborg said.
‘Inge, you know as well as I do that there’s only one gang in our manor capable of mounting an armed hold-up. In Bristol there are three or four. If I were planning a crime here I wouldn’t hire the local mob. I’d bring in some of the Bristol boys.’
‘I totally agree,’ she said. ‘And it puts one of my doubts to rest. Anyone from here trying to cosy up to the Bath lot runs the risk of being recognised.’
‘What are your other doubts?’
She sighed. This was clearly difficult for her. ‘Whoever takes it on has to face up to what happens if some situation arises.’
‘Situation?’
‘Law-breaking.’
‘I get you. How are you going to deal with it if they commit another crime?’
‘Not just me. Anyone. If it comes to court and the undercover cop is found to have aided and abetted, he or she is as guilty as the perpetrators.’