V. Christianne
Christianne Maddock drew back the curtain and tumbled in beside Thomas Gerard in his four-poster bed. She’d just visited the third-floor privy, and had to say it was quite the luxury. There was something to be said for living in a London Bridge house, and one was that the toilet emptied straight down into the river, dispensing with the need for chamber pots and close stools. One had only to descend to the third floor.
Christianne was nineteen. She had been on the game for five years before she had encountered the physician whose bed she now shared.
She had worked at the Cardinal’s Hat brothel in Bankside not far from the Bear Garden. Somehow in that time she had managed to avoid contracting syphilis—one of the numerous perils of her profession. Gerard treated the women for various ailments, including two she knew who had contracted syphilis and two others for pregnancies. One had kept her child; the other made use of an abortifacient the doctor had procured, made with rue. For the syphilis there was only mercury, and it only seemed to help when the affliction was caught early; yet miraculously Dr. Gerard’s ministrations seemed to banish even the pox. Others he treated for wounds and injuries suffered mainly at the hands of their customers. She’d had her share of those sorts, but usually could get them drunk enough to make them pliable and easy to evict. If it hadn’t been for Threston, her relationship with the good doctor might never have evolved into anything.
The owner of the Cardinal’s Hat was named Urquhart. She thought him by and large a fair man, not one to sample or even handle his own merchandise. His passion, if it could be called that, was gambling, at which he was not particularly lucky.
One night, playing cards in an upstairs room, he had lost heavily; the final pot had included co-ownership of the Cardinal’s Hat. The morning after, it was all any of the women could talk about.
The man he’d lost to, his new partner, believed that every girl and woman working for him was also required to service him if and as he chose. Unfortunately, what he, Threston, seemed to enjoy most was causing pain. Within a few weeks, other girls had been variously whipped or caned, kicked down the stairs, and in one instance burnt with a poker across the backs of her thighs.
Whereas Urquhart might protect the women in his employ from a violent customer, nobody was going to protect them from the new co-owner himself. When Threston finally got around to her, Christianne scorned his invitation and in return received a beating that broke her nose and cut her lip and nearly dislocated her jaw. She was fortunate not to lose any teeth.
Thus did Threston see to it that Christianne met the physician Thomas Gerard outside of the Cardinal’s Hat.
She sought the Lazar-house where Gerard often worked. Another of the doxies, named Ellen, accompanied her to make sure she met up with Gerard.
Christianne doubted Threston would notice her absence, but to be safe, she hid in the early morning shadows until she spotted Gerard returning from St. Thomas Hospital a few streets away. She had not announced her presence to the French woman who arrived there first. The woman might have taken her in, but Christianne did not know her. Instead, wearing an old, stiffened hood, she approached him. He saw her swollen face, crooked nose, gashed mouth, and heavily bruised jaw. Asking no questions, he led her inside.
It would be days before she was even recognizable as herself again. Gerard treated her cuts and bruises and carefully set her nose, which adjustment caused her to pass out. While he treated her, he asked her repeatedly who had done this to her, but she preferred not to say. This was her situation to deal with, not his.
When she woke, the doctor explained to her that as the Lazar-house currently contained no plague victims, she was welcome to remain there while she healed—at least until that situation changed. She could assist Mme Bennet in cleaning and purifying the rooms if she felt a need to pay for her keep. The floors always needed new rushes. Under no circumstances was she to return to the Cardinal’s Hat. Christianne objected. She complained how much money she was failing to make because of what Threston had done. Gerard asked how much that might be. He really seemed to have no idea. She replied that she could be making ten or even fifteen shillings the week, but “looking like this, I’ll be lucky to win a penny to buy a loaf.” She flexed her jaw and winced. “Like maybe though I couldn’t eat it if I did.”
She had no family, at least none she was going to admit to. That life had hardly been better than what Threston offered. Gerard, on the other hand, proposed to try to find her some suitable employment while she healed. “Even with no particular skills, I’m sure you could make three pounds a year as a maidservant.”
She gave him a tolerant smile but shook her head carefully. “Take from me my thanks, but I’ll go back to what I know soon enough. Other than Threston I been doing just fine at the Cardinal. Look out for each other, we sisters do.” He nodded but seemed to want to say something more, probably how, since Threston’s arrival, more of the women seemed to require looking out for.
Instead, he replied, “At least allow me to do you some kindness. Be our guest here until you heal. Mme Bennet will look after you. You are far less trouble than any plague victim.”
Yet, a mere three days later, it seemed that the far-off plague had arrived, and the beds began to fill up again. Gerard explained, “A light plague year unfortunately doesn’t mean a year without plague.” He described the disease as imitating the ocean, arriving in waves. Why, he did not know. No one knew. There were any number of theories, he said, but many more questions than answers: Why did far more men contract plague than women? Why was it that foreign ships arrived off the high seas with a crew already plague-ridden? How had it found them at sea? Had they carried it aboard, a secret cargo, from their port of origin?
Christianne knew of a brothel on the far side of the river that had been shut because of Italian sailors who had brought plague into the house. Upon arrival, they had shown no signs of it.
“The Lord Mayor,” said Gerard, “unhelpfully blames the irregular outbreaks on Londoners’ fondness for theater-going—especially those awfully corrupted souls who attend plays in the new playhouses erected over in Shoreditch. You know the sort. They absent themselves from church services on Sundays. And yet the Queen herself loves and patronizes theater, even has her own company of players. But that is another matter. My concern is that we must move you elsewhere for your safety.”
She dismissed the problem: She would simply return to the Cardinal’s Hat despite that Threston remained there. She’d had a visitor from the brothel the day before who warned her that Threston was threatening to garnish her earnings for a year for having run off. At least he wasn’t hunting her down yet.
The swelling was much reduced in her face, and her bruises, while tinged with yellow and still a source of pain, were beginning to fade. Her friend Ellen came looking for her, and she prepared to leave, to return to the Cardinal’s Hat. That was when Gerard abruptly intervened.
He stepped into the doorway of the room where she stood with Ellen. “Fool that I am,” he said, “I should have thought of this before. My own apartment lacks the services of a good maidservant. What would you say to my proposal that you remain awhile in my employ and take care of my house? Just until you’re completely healed or you tire of the position, the work. Threston need know nothing of it. And I can afford to pay you well, let’s say a sovereign a week for this? More money than you can expect to make at the Cardinal’s Hat. Truly, after a year, you might even buy the Cardinal’s Hat and evict Threston.”
Christianne looked first at Ellen, who shrugged, then at Gerard as if she’d never seen him before. Finally, Ellen placed a hand on Christianne’s wrist and gave her a slight approving nod. “I will wait outside. Don’t rush nothin’.”
When Ellen had gone, she asked, “A sovereign? Each week?”
“That’s right.” A gold sovereign—she wasn’t certain she had ever held one in her hand. He might as well have promised her a myth. She knew him for a kind man, but she could not trust that there was no catch to such a contract.
“What shall I be, then?” she asked him. “Nursemaid? You have children, need caring for? A wife who needs someone to help with the cooking and the cleaning? That what this is about?”
“If that were the case, would that be so bad?”
“For a sovereign, it hardly matters. I just want to know what it is you think you’re acquiring.”
His expression told her that he could understand her mistrust. “Very well,” he said, “there is no one else. I’ve no family for you to look after. No one at all.” He bowed his head. “I’m sure if anything it will be quite boring. If you want to leave at any time, you can. It will always be up to you, although I find the Cardinal’s Hat the poorer option. You’ll have your own chamber in my house, your own bed. Granted it will be a trundle bed until I can get an oak frame made to suit. But I swear to you I won’t interfere with you.”
She smiled, winced at the twinge in her jaw, and then answered, “Why not?”
That was how she ended up in his apartments on London Bridge.
It took them a half hour to walk amongst the tight, milling crowd, passing through one underpass after another and the various shops on both sides of the central throughway, then beneath the prefabricated jewel of the bridge, Nonsuch House, before arriving at his own house. “Nonsuch,” he told her, “was assembled here where the drawbridge tower used to be. It’s not quite the same size, and there are some planks of drawbridge remaining. You see?” He led her over to the wall to look downriver. “The drawbridge hadn’t worked in eighty years. Watch this step here. This board is dangerously rotten. They should really put up a barrier around it before some sheep or person finishes the job of splitting it in two. Of a clear morning, from here one can see all the way to Rotherhithe. Of course, I have a better view up on my roof. Come.” He took her hand and led her back to the twelve-foot-wide bridge road. According to Gerard, nineteen arches spanned the river below, all supported upon starlings of elm, some larger than others. With no drawbridges remaining, this had become the farthest point up the river that tall ships could sail.
Thomas Gerard occupied the top two floors of the next four-story house on the east side after Nonsuch. Another, similar structure occupied the side opposite. Both structures leaned toward each other. He pointed high up to a large post wedged between them. “If that wasn’t there, I think my house and that one should have met for a kiss in the middle.”
The hanging sign above the ground-floor door read The Ruff Shop. As the name implied, the shop made and sold ruffs of every size and color. It did a brisk business as well in pins. The second floor housed the shop-owner, his family, and his apprentice.
Bertelmeeus Van der Paas sat behind his counting table. He had reddish-brown hair receding at the sides of his forehead. Thomas led Christianne around the shop, introducing the ruff-maker’s sturdy wife Jutte, and his two daughters, Susan and Lettice. The latter girl was shy around the young, blond apprentice, who was named Fulke. The three of them worked at two long benches clustered near a small hearth where a fire was burning despite the warm day.
While Gerard explained to the proprietor that he had hired a maidservant, Christianne wandered over to the two benches to watch the trio at work.
Fulke and Lettice folded a long strip of material that had been sized, cut, and stitched by Van der Paas; they each used a warm iron poking stick with which they made pleat after pleat in the material around a central “neck,” turn by turn creating the cartridge pleated form of a ruff, so skillful in their efforts that each fold of figure eights was nearly identical to all the others. Susan concentrated on brushing a slightly bluish paste of starch over and into each gather of a completed ruff before setting the whole thing aside to dry and stiffen.
Finished ruffs stood on display throughout the shop, some consisting of hundreds of pleats, a few the size of serving platters. The most impressive one on display stood an elaborate three tiers high, and each pale tier was of a different color and decorated with jewels and pearls. “The b-bottom layer,” Fulke explained to Christianne, “contains six hun-hundred pleats.”
Christianne stood transfixed by the process going on around her. From where he sat, Van der Paas looked her up and down with some concern. She had pushed back the hood of her cloak, revealing the damage done to her. The ruff-maker looked critically at his landlord. Gerard shook his head, then walked over to her.
“Perhaps,” he said to her, “later you will want to pick out a new ruff or two for yourself. A sovereign goes a very long way.”
“She will want some pins, too, I think,” Van der Paas called out. “Yes?”
Christianne gave him a crooked smile and nodded. They continued on to the back of the shop and the stairs.
The third floor comprised a broad hall, with a high ceiling. The hall contained an old but sturdy trestle table, four solid chairs, a smaller side table, and a counter table with till drawers as if Thomas performed accounting here (he explained that it was a secondhand table, a castoff from downstairs after Van der Paas bought the larger one he was using now). This one supported a pitcher and a bowl for washing the hands. A tray on the trestle table offered cheeses and fruits. A house servant, whose main employment was in Nonsuch House, had been and gone already. So, Gerard already had a servant, thought Christianne.
The walls here were covered in carved linenfold panels, which gave it the look of a library filled with books all of the same brown color. Two of the walls were mostly covered with tapestries. A stone floor circled out from the recessed fireplace, situated directly over the hearth in the first-floor shop, no doubt sharing the same chimney. Beside it was a doorway to a modest kitchen and pantry. Most of the hall’s plank floor was covered in matting, and sprinkled with fresh rushes and herbs, making the rooms smell inviting—especially important given the small privy chamber clinging like a distended wasp’s nest to the outside wall beside the kitchen, its lid-covered wooden seat revealing a straight shot down into the Thames. One of her jobs as maidservant would be to replace the fragrant rushes as they dried out. “There is a shop near the north end of the Bridge sells them,” he told her. He led her up to the fourth floor.
That floor was divided into three more rooms, the smallest hardly more than an open closet. The medium room, being used for storage, contained very little—a small travel chest, satchels, cloaks, pairs of boots. The walls here were covered in a repeating paper pattern that had been in place when he purchased the property, according to Gerard.
The room had a sloping dormer ceiling on one side. At the end of the dormer a small door opened onto the flat rooftop of the third floor. A low parapet curved around the rooftop. Wind off the river below buffeted them. She stood at the edge and looked down. The bulge of the privy was discernible past the parapet.
As he had promised, the view of the river was spectacular.
The largest room on the top floor contained his bed and two chairs. The opposite side of the dormer slanted away here. Another door opened onto the third floor roof. From underneath the oak frame of his bed, Gerard pulled out a trundle bed. The trundle was more of a cot—a smaller, narrower frame that fit snugly under the bed. It was made up with a smaller mattress, a pillow, and a wool blanket. He reiterated that Christianne was to have a bed of her own in the other chamber before many days had passed. “The carpenter who provided this one for me is quite reliable. I’ve no doubt he’ll have something with posts already carved or else we shall have him situate and carve them here.”
As neither of them had eaten much throughout the day, Gerard insisted on taking her to the Sun Tavern on New Fish Street.
It proved to be a raucous evening, as the Lord Admiral’s Men were there celebrating a performance by one of theirs, an actor named Edward Alleyn, at the newest London theater, The Curtain. From what she could overhear, Alleyn had acted an astonishing female lead in whatever play they were celebrating. Given how much they were laughing, she guessed it must be a comedy.
Gerard ordered assorted meat pies, savories, and a sealed quart of wine. The two of them ate ravenously, and mostly ignored the cheering and shouting of the actors, who themselves ignored everyone who wasn’t in their company, save for one, who glanced her way a few times. She was fairly sure she’d had him and not all that long ago.
True to his word, Gerard left her on her own in the house while he tended to an increasing number of plague victims at both the hospital and Lazar-house. Simply as something to do, she cleaned the house and replaced the old rushes. Each day upon his return, he seemed to expect her to have gone, just as each day he seemed delighted that she wasn’t.
Twice in those first nights she attempted to climb into his bed with him. The first time, he politely declined: “As I swore, you do not owe me any sexual favors in trade either for the work or the money.” The second night, he insisted more adamantly still.
“If it’s boys you prefer, Doctor, I can recommend two who are very good.”
He started to reply but then seemed to give up. He thanked her for her offer, but declined.
Two nights later, she waited until he was asleep. Then she carefully climbed in so as not to wake him. In the morning, she stirred lazily and opened her eyes, as though his looking at her had roused her. Then she rolled over and climbed atop him with purpose. He said, “How can you be so petite and yet weigh on me like a boulder?”
She, stroking his passion until it equaled her own, leaned down and whispered to him, “I’m not doing ’is out’a some debt. You need ta understand that perhaps I want something, too. And wanting it, I mean to take it.” She promptly proved her statement.
The night after that when she came to his bed, he put up no fight. She said, “I ain’t ashamed of my skills. This is my choice, so not your place to reject it. You did offer me the freedom to choose, yes?”
“I did,” he agreed.
By the fourth day, a carpenter and his assistants arrived with the sections of a bed frame for her. As Gerard had predicted, they brought posts that were already elaborately and beautifully carved. The doctor purchased a large coil of rope, which the carpenter used to thread and tie off in lengths supporting the mattress. Then he lay the feather-stuffed mattress upon them. Now, he said, she had a bed of her own in place in a separate, if slightly cluttered, room and she need not come to him again. She did anyway, night after night. “People aren’t meant to sleep alone,” she said. “At the Cardinal’s Hat, the other girls and I slept together often, shared our beds. Especially once Threston arrived.”
At the end of the first week, she received her promised sovereign. She was by then keeping house for him and even sometimes cooking. London Bridge was practically its own market. Cattle and fruits and vegetables from Kent crossed the Bridge on their way to Leadenhall or Cheapside or one of the other markets. The clogged thoroughfare ensured that there was always time to barter and almost always something of interest to barter for.
The second time she received her sovereign, she asked for two weeks more in advance, and he gave it obligingly. It was obvious from his expression that he expected more than ever she would be gone when he returned.
Instead, she spent the next day in Van der Paas’s ruff emporium, handling one of the heated rods and intricately but somewhat clumsily pleating a ruff under the guidance of no less than Van der Paas himself. It was warm working with the rod so near the hearth, and Christianne had removed her sleeves, her pleated skirt, and bum roll, leaving her in shift and apron. Her dark hair, loose, hung halfway down her back. She looked up at Gerard when he entered, and grinned.
The ruff-maker pursed his lips and vigorously nodded. “She might become very good at the pleats, I think,” he said. “She has—what you say—the knack of it? She wants to learn starching, you know, as well and, while I can teach her, she should go to Antwerpen and the employ of Diones Welfes, who is the queen of the starching. That will make of her an expert. In great demand.”
That afternoon they returned to the Sun Tavern. She revealed that she had spent his sovereigns to pay for her apprenticeship in ruff-making. She intended, she said, to learn everything about the trade and then open her own shop. “That would be—that is, I would be pleased to see that.”
A week later, while Gerard was at the Lazar-house, Threston turned up at the Ruff Shop.
He came through the shop door dressed in adequate finery—doublet, baggy leggings, and an absurdly large codpiece. He had the furious bleary-eyed look of an insulted bear in his cups. He wore no cloak, and his ruff was dirty and half-unpinned.
Her back to him, Christianne stood in her shift and apron in the shadows of the shop, bent over a length of silk she was attempting to work into the appropriate shape. The form had gotten away from her. Lettice, beside her, clucked her tongue at the uneven folds and told her to start it again, and she would have, only she heard and then saw Threston where he stood berating Van der Paas himself. He hadn’t yet seen her. She laid the poking stick down on the bricks of the hearth. To Lettice, she whispered, “Tell me when he leaves.”
Van der Paas said, “You seem to be in need of some pins, sir.”
Threston’s lowery gaze fastened on Van der Paas as the man in charge. He pressed one hand into his collarbone. “You,” he said, “I’m told a doctor name of Gerard lives above here. That so?”
The proprietor replied honestly, “The physician is not at home. You to St. Thomas Hospital should go.”
“I know that. It ain’t ’im I’m lookin’ for. It’s the girl ’e brought ’ere for ’is own.”
Van der Paas could not overcome the natural instinct to glance her way.
Threston followed that glance. Christianne didn’t even have to see him to feel his attention. She glanced at Lettice, who shook her head, but Threston had already started across the shop.
“There she is,” he said loudly, as if she were an old friend.
She turned around to face him.
“Well now, girl, we been holdin’ your space but you hain’t turned up to earn your keep. A small fortune you owe The Cardinal already. You think you’re gonna go off an’ make ruffs nah, do ya? This your new livelihood? Not what you’re for, is it?” As he passed one of the displays, he shoved the elaborate ruff on its stand onto the floor. Van der Paas cursed him and ran forward. Threston ignored him and circled the table at which she’d been working. “You’re an investment, like, you know. You don’t get to leave before you’ve paid the balance.”
Christianne backed up to the hearth, Lettice beside her. Van der Paas shouted, “You get out of my shop, vandal!” Threston turned to deal with him.
That was when Christianne grabbed and whipped one of the hot iron poking sticks against his face. Threston sprawled across the table, knocking strips of material, pins, and neck forms every which way. He rolled over and stood up. A red welt cut across his cheek and the bridge of his nose. The stick had somehow spared his eye.
Christianne fled past Van der Paas and out into the crowded thoroughfare. The only thing she could think to do was spare the family from this bastard. She glanced back, to see Threston lurch out of the shop after her. He immediately encountered a large flock of sheep being driven across the bridge to market. The sheep trapped him.
She thought of running all the way to the Lazar-house, but decided she was tired of running from him. She turned and made sure he saw her as she fled toward Nonsuch House. He shoved and kicked the sheep aside. Their herder cursed him. He ignored the empty threat. From one voluminous sleeve he drew out a short baton that he gripped beside his leg. She knew that when he caught her this time he would beat her to death.
Christianne ran to the edge of where the old drawbridge had been, the spot where Gerard and she had stood. It might work. It was all she could think of to do.
Threston charged after her. She still had the poking stick and she still held it as if promising him a fight. Given the chance, she would stab him. He leered. There was going to be no chance. He was going to toss her into the Thames, and she knew it. He would watch her fall all the way down. He was that sort. But not until he’d punished her for gashing his face. He touched his cheek, looked at his bloody fingers, then licked them, and grinned at her again.
He marched straight for her, crossing the same boards as she had done, but the same boards proved less inclined to support a fifteen-stone lout than an eight-stone woman. One moment Threston was there, and in the next the plank Gerard had pointed out to her had snapped with a loud crack and Threston was gone. Someone in the crowd may have screamed, but it might only have been a sheep bleating in triumph.
Uncertain she could believe her own eyes, Christianne walked carefully to the jagged hole in the drawbridge plank and peered down.
Threston hadn’t reached the river. He’d landed on one of the large piers and rolled down to the stone and brushwood starling. His head was canted oddly.
She edged around the broken board and made her way back along the side of the bridge road to the shop, ignoring the catcalls her half-undressed state provoked. Once inside, she marched to the table where she’d been working. Van der Paas, his daughters, and Fulke just stared at her in awe. She set the poking rod down on the hearth to warm it again, and then, as if they’d not even been interrupted, said to Lettice, “Now, please show me what I did wrong.”
Gerard returned to his apartments late in the afternoon. Christianne told him immediately what had happened. Confession finally cracked the stoic façade she’d managed to hold onto. She began to tremble as she described what had happened by Nonsuch House. She knew Threston would murder her, but had nowhere else to run. She clutched at Thomas Gerard and cried, releasing all that she’d been holding in, maybe since Threston had beat her. She expected now that she would be arrested for luring the villain to his death. When she cried herself out, Gerard took her back downstairs and left her with Susan while he went to see for himself.
Returning to the shop, he informed her that the tide had come in and had swept Threston away. “I can’t imagine anyone at the Cardinal’s Hat will miss him, and you can stop worrying that someone might be coming after you. From here you make whatever life you want.”