Free The Stone Wife by Peter Lovesey Page B

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 chanceto 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