S.J. Parris - Sacrilege

BY EVENING WE had reached the small market town of Dartford. As if sensing an end to the journey, the horses slowed their pace along the main street as I scanned the painted signs that hung immobile from the eaves of low timber-framed buildings in search of a suitable inn. The fierce heat of the day had begun to subside, but the air remained heavy and it was a welcome relief to ride into the shade of houses. At the end of the high street we found an inn that must have stood in that spot beside the river for more than a century; I pictured generations of long-dead pilgrims pressing through the wide gates into its yard, footsore and dry-throated, hoping desperately—as was I—that there would be a room.

I pulled my horse gently to a halt outside the gate and turned to Sophia. She had remained unusually quiet through the afternoon’s long hours of riding as the sun hammered down, the road affording little respite except for the few brief stretches where we passed between copses of beech trees. Now she raised her head to reveal a face streaked with dirt and sweat, lips crusted with the dust of the road.

“Don’t clean yourself up too much,” I remarked, quietly. “You look more like a boy with all that filth on you.”

She rubbed the back of one hand across her mouth. “I must smell appalling.”

“No worse than any other traveller in here.”

My body ached from the ride, my thighs, back, and behind sore and stiff from the hours in the saddle, but Sophia had not uttered a word of complaint, though I knew she was unused to riding and I had noticed in the last hour of our journey how she winced whenever she shifted position. My horse gave a little jog on the spot and whinnied with impatience; perhaps he could smell fresh hay from the inn yard. I looked down at my hands on the reins for a moment, then back at Sophia. There was one subject I had not dared to broach with her on the journey, but it could not be avoided any longer.

“I fear we will have to share a room tonight.” I had not meant to state it so baldly, but there was no point in being coy. She appeared not the least surprised by this; her expression, beneath the dust, seemed unperturbed.

“I know.”

“Because you are travelling as my servant, you see, and it would arouse suspicion if we did not,” I continued, speaking too fast. “Besides”—I tapped the purse at my belt—“we must use our money wisely. We don’t know how long we will need to make it last.”

Sophia nodded, as if all this had been understood and agreed; her calm only made me more flustered. It also brought a sharp pang of rejection; I realised that, for her, the prospect of sharing a room carried none of the implications it held for me. I looked away, sizing up the inn, scratching the damp hair at the back of my neck until I was sure my eyes would not betray me.

“We must take great care from now on, especially in the company of strangers,” I said, lowering my voice. “There may be people on the road looking for you, and we do not know if a reward has been offered in Canterbury for your capture. And your disguise is flimsy, to say the least.” I looked her up and down. “The best thing you can do is to speak as little as possible. Your voice is more likely to give you away than anything. You can always pretend to be simple.”

She smiled, and rolled her shoulders back to ease the stiffness.

“And you, Bruno, must remember to call me Kit. And don’t keep looking at me the way a man looks at a woman. If anything is likely to give us away, it is you.” She wagged a finger, pretending to chide, but I did not laugh. So she had noticed how I looked at her. Was she as indifferent to that as she sounded, or was she simply better at being practical than I in this situation, as women so often are? “Try to forget you ever knew me as Sophia,” she whispered, glancing around to make sure no one could overhear. “You must think of me as a boy all the time now.”

“I will do my best. Though you must understand, I don’t find that easy.”

She smiled again, and behind the exhaustion and the dirt I saw a gleam in those amber eyes that might have been an acknowledgement of my meaning.

“You had better call me by another name too,” I added, shifting my weight in the saddle to ease my back. “I travel as Filippo Savolino, scholar of Padua.”

“Why? Do you think your fame has reached as far as Canterbury?” The corners of her mouth twitched in amusement.

“Don’t laugh—my last book was very popular in Paris. It’s not impossible.” I smiled. “It’s just a precaution. There are people who would like to track me down too, don’t forget.” And not just the Inquisition, I added silently, thinking of the various enemies I had made in barely more than a year in England.

“Why that name? Is it someone you knew?”

“In a sense. It was the name I used in Italy after I fled the monastery. Filippo is the name my parents baptised me—I took Giordano when I entered the Dominican order. Savolino was my mother’s family name.”

She nodded slowly, her eyes narrowed as if reappraising me.

“So all this time, I have never even known your real name. What other secrets do you hide, Filippo?”

“Oh, hundreds. But I do not give them up to just anyone.”

I winked, and gently kicked my horse onwards towards the inn yard, pleased to think that I had in some small way intrigued her again.

THAT NIGHT, AFTER an uncomfortable supper in the inn’s crowded taproom, eaten almost in silence to avoid any more attention from the travellers, traders, and itinerants who regarded us suspiciously from beneath their brows, Sophia and I faced each other by the light of a candle across the narrow bed of our small room. For the first time all day she took off her cap and scratched violently at her sweat-plastered hair until it stuck up in tufts. An earthenware jug and bowl stood on a washstand under the one grimy window; she poured out a little water and splashed it over her face and neck. I turned abruptly, aware that I had been watching her too intently.

“You take the bed,” I said, sitting on it to ease off my boots. The money hidden there had rubbed my ankles raw and I hoped we would reach Canterbury undisturbed so that I could find a more secure hiding place at the house of Doctor Harry Robinson.

The inn was spartan, but by no means among the worst places I had endured as a traveller; it smelled strongly of the sweat of men and horses, but so did every place in this heat. I tugged my shirt out from my breeches and flapped it up and down. The room the innkeeper had given us was at the top of the house and the heat of the day was trapped under the eaves; even with the casement open, the air seemed to crush the breath from you. I glanced down at the small truckle bed that pulled out from under the main bed, meant for a servant to sleep alongside his master. I decided I would sleep in my underhose; even if Sophia had not been there, I had learned from experience that it was never wise to go to bed entirely naked in a roadside inn, however hot it might be. You never knew when you might need to leap to your feet at a moment’s notice.

I unbuckled the belt holding my purse and the bone-handled knife and laid them carefully on the floor before turning back to look at her. Her hair was spiked at the front from the water and her efforts at washing had merely succeeded in spreading the dust over her face in different patterns, giving her an endearingly impish look. She met my eyes, then wrapped her arms around herself awkwardly before glancing across the room. Her gaze fell on a cracked piss-pot in the corner and immediately I understood.

“I think I will just go and check on the horses,” I said quickly, pulling my boots back on. Poor Sophia—this was one of the hardest parts about her disguise, and the one most likely to betray her, I thought—that she could not piss like a man. Earlier in the day I had had to wait by the side of the road holding her horse’s bridle while she looked for a spot in some trees, away from the eyes of passersby. More than her voice, we must take care that her refusal to relieve herself on any street corner alongside other boys did not attract undue attention. “Latch the door behind me and don’t open it to anyone,” I added, standing up. I tucked the knife into the waist of my breeches, just in case. We had drawn stares in the taproom, I supposed because between us we looked so exotic. One day’s ride in the sun had tanned my Italian skin the colour of olivewood, making me look yet more foreign, and Sophia, for all her filthy clothes, was so striking as to make any man look twice. Even if no one suspected she was a woman, there were always plenty of men in any roadside tavern whose tastes were broad enough to include a pretty, soft-skinned boy.