Julian Rathbone - Kings of Albion

I am lying on my side, supported on my elbow above him. For a moment I allow my free hand to wander slowly over his chest and across his stomach. He flinches and the skin beneath my palm shrinks a little. 'That tickles.'

I reach across him, take hold of his wrist, which is strong, hard, bony, and pull his arm back, slide my hand up to his, lift his fingers, smell his fingertips and suck them gently. They smell of the sea and taste of oysters stewed in honey. I lick his palm, lift my upper thigh a touch and put his hand back where it had been.

'Could be,' I say, 'that you drank and ate too much.'

Indeed, Alderman and Mistress Dawtrey's hospitality had been royally generous, better than anything we had experienced since leaving the Caliph's palace in Misr-al-Kahira. Their house, just a few yards up East Cheap on the corner of St Clement's Lane, was a big three-storeyed building, double-roofed and gabled, timber-framed, with red tiles on top. The Alderman and his wife were in the front doorway waiting to welcome us and there I received the third and fourth kisses of the day (there were many more yet to come), full on the lips, which I now understood is the English custom, before taking us through a narrow, wood-panelled vestibule into a hall which fills much of the ground floor though offices, both household and to do with Dawtrey's commercial enterprises, lead off it.

The rest of the day passes in a confusion of eating, entertainment and business, of much coining and going. A physician is sent for to bind Eddie's arm and I have to forbear from openly challenging the idiocies In- practises in the name of medicine and offering my own poultices and herbal remedies, though later on I put together a potion using some of the spices we have brought and some herbs from the kitchen garden behind the Dawtreys' house. This will keep his fever down and speed up the healing process.

The people he saw through the afternoon were, of course, merchants. What Eddie wants for the Yorkists is money. What they want is lowering of duties, and a lifting of restrictions once a York is on the throne or, anyway, the government in the hands of Yorkists rather than a mad, spendthrift king and a witch of a queen. And, of course, Eddie can't deliver without the cash, and they daren't be seen to support him until the Yorkists are in power as to do so might be putting their heads all too literally on the block. So they proceed with mouse-like caution, while Eddie makes promises he can't keep.

Then one old man, with a long, flowing white beard and a big red velvet hat with a long scarf looped round it and round his neck, above a black velvet gown, comes rumbling in, stamping newly fallen snow off his boots and refusing to be divested of his cloak until he has drunk a quart of red wine heated with cloves and cinnamon, our cloves and cinnamon, with small sour apples bobbing in it, and eaten half a loaf of hot bread and a plate of rabbit stew. Then he coughs like a whale and spits a great fistful of phlegm into the tire, whose heat he was keeping from every one else. He ignores Eddie and turns to Alderman Dawtrey. 'Fucking Hanse,' he says.

'Oh, hear, hear,' say all the rest.

'Over the fucking top this time,' he says.

'Oh, absolutely,' they reply.

'You know what their latest ploy is?' 'No, but you're going to tell us.'

'No Inglysshe cloth north or east of the Weser unless it's in Hanse ships.' 'You're joking.'

'No. I've a lad works in their kitchens down Steelyard, keeps his ears and eyes open. They'll be coming up to Guildhall in a day or two with a proclamation to that effect.'

'Fucking German bastards.'

'What are we going to do? Got to do something. They've already tied up the cloth markets in Antwerp, Bruges and Cologne. We'll be lucky if we make ten per cent.' Dawtrey turned on Eddie. 'You see? If we had a proper king who lived in London, or Westminster anyway, and had some real clout, they wouldn't dare. I mean, if you were king, what would you do?'

Eddie doesn't hesitate.

'I'd tell my Lord High Admiral to get the fleet out and sink the next Hanse convoy that came anywhere near our coasts and then I'd invite the bastards in Steelyard to dinner in the Tower and suggest a compromise might be reached before they go home.'

It's what they want to hear.

At this moment Ali swings himself nearer on that stick of his, takes Eddie by the elbow and they have a few quiet words together. By the way, Prince Harihara and Anish are no longer with us, having retired to a chamber at the back of the house where they're busy filling chamber-pots. I told them not to drink the water unless they had seen it boiled first. Later I'll make sure they eat some plain boiled rice and suck a lemon or two. Then Eddie nods and turns back to these merchants. 'I don't know why I didn't think of it straight away,' he says, 'but my lord of Warwick, over in Calais, has eight carvels – with cannon – and I'm sure, for a fairly large consideration, he could have them mocked up to look like pirates

And so it goes on, through to about two o'clock when Mistress Dawtrey causes a dinner to be served so all the visitors can eat, and drink of course, before early nightfall. There's roast swan and sturgeon, a barrel of oysters, followed by marzipan made from almonds and crystallised sugar-cane juice bought off a Moorish boat that has just come in from Malaga and a barrel of the sweet wine from the same port. But half-way through Eddie goes a touch pale and begins to sweat, and I suggest he should be in bed. He argues, till I let him know I'll come up and tuck him in.

So here we are now, and his little man is no longer a little man but a very big man, standing up proud like a bowsprit above his stomach, and flicking the way a young man's does when its full of blood and spunk and responds to the heartbeat.

'But I can't lie with you,' he moans. 'My fucking arm. I'll never be able to hold myself on top of you and do it properly.'

'Properly?' I say, marvelling at the innocence of this seventeen-year-old. 'What's properly?'

And I swing my leg, which glows like a ripe peach in the candlelight, across his tummy and kneel above him. I tease the tip of his prick with the lips of my cunt for a moment or two then lower her on to him, swallowing him right up. And. of course, the silly bugger conies straight away and I have to start all over again.

Not, I promise you, out of our love-play, but taking infection from the filth, damp and cold of the attic they have hidden him in, Eddie's fever worsens. The cut on his arm festers a little, oozes a yellow pus and then a colourless ichor, and he complains of alternating heat and cold, comes out in terrible sweats, and suffers a thirst like torture. It's so bad Mistress Dawtrey wants him out of the place, believing him perhaps to have the plague, but it is winter with frost most nights and sometimes all through the day as well, and the plague never strikes, they say. when the weather is cold. Anyway, he lives thus through three days and nights and no one survives the plague that long. And now it occurs to me that I know why plague absents itself in winter, though no one will believe me. It's carried by fleas. And frost kills fleas. Simple as that.

I find this fever enhances our love-making. Think of the heat of his body almost too hot to touch, after I have stripped off beneath those cobwebby rafters, low, so that short though I am I have to stoop, and the icy draught thrusts like a sword through the gaps round the tiny window. Imagine us on deep straw mattresses, the top one eiderdown from Zeeland, beneath a pile of woollen blankets and furs making a cave filled with the odours of sweat, sperm, my love-juices, the slick sweetness of pus and shit. Then when it's over for a time and I lie with my head on his shoulder, my runny nose peeping above the coven, and our breaths making mist in the dim light above our heads and the pigeons inside the eaves cr-croo, cr-croo, and the mice scuttle between the joists. Runny nose? Yes, I've caught the cold. The cold even-one in this wet, cold island has.