The Canterbury Sisters Read Online Free Page B

good, so I dip into the nearest café. Order the “standard” without thinking and am greeted with the eternally confounding British breakfast of baked beans, mushrooms, and tomatoes. But I realize I’m hungry once I smell it, perhaps truly hungry for the first time in days. As I work my way through the plate of food, I read the email from the professor once again, this time in a calmer state of mind.
    The Broads Abroad are meeting at the George Inn for luncheon, she writes. It’s near the site of the Tabard Inn where Chaucer and his pilgrims began their journey five hundred years ago, but the Tabard burned somewhere along the way in some sort of brothel fire. The George is of the same ilk and era and thus a suitable spot to inaugurate a pilgrimage. Those are the precise words she uses—“ilk,” “era,” “inaugurate” and “pilgrimage”—and I wonder again that a woman on the brink of surgery would take the time to write such a wordy and persuasive note. It is a British trait, evidently, this chipperness in the face of adversity, this compulsion to wax about medieval history while bent double in pain.
    Take the tube to London Bridge Station, she advises, and you’ll find the George no more than a ten-minute walk away. I eat my beans and look at a map I grabbed on the train. It’s a considerable distance from Paddington to London Bridge, but then again I have hours to kill and after being cooped up on the plane, a long walk might do me good. I don’t intend to actually join the group, of course. At least not without a little reconnaissance. She says there are eight women on the tour, counting the guide, and a party of that size should be easy to spot. I decide I will observe them from a suitable distance and try to gauge how annoying they are before I make my decision. If they seem okay, I will approach them. If not, I can catch the train from London Bridge to Canterbury and scatter my mother alone.
    ACCORDING TO Wikipedia, Chaucer’s pilgrims began their journey in Southwark, then a sketchy part of London. Southwark was outside the city limits, the medieval equivalent of a suburb, and thus beyond the reach of the law. The district was filled with prostitutes, thieves, and drunkards.
    Now it’s full of tourists. The entire London Bridge area, in fact, is a hub of amusements designed for foreigners on holiday. The bridge itself, as well as the dungeon and the tower and several full-size reproductions of sailing ships, which are moored and bobbing on the Thames. People are even walking the streets in costume, handing out flyers for museums and tour buses, and I am barely within Southwark when I’m accosted by a man dressed like Sir Walter Raleigh. I know he’s Raleigh because he makes a grand gesture—steps back and bows, taking off his shabby red velvet cloak as if he might lay it across one of the rather sizable puddles that have formed on the street. I guess the idea is for me to walk over the cloak like the original Queen Elizabeth, but I shake my head to show him this isn’t necessary. To show him that, despite the fact I’m wearing a backpack and dragging a suitcase, I’m not your typical American tourist. No matter how gallant he pretends to be, I will not follow him back to the dock and pay ten pounds to tour his boat. He’s got the wrong sort of fool entirely. To emphasize my independence and busyness, I step directly into the puddle.
    He smiles.
    “Fare thee well, milady,” he says, his voice rising a bit on the last syllable, as if it were a question.
    Is he mocking me? Is “Fare thee well” Elizabethan for “Fuck you”? I’ve always suspected that British men consider themselves wildly attractive to American women, and let’s face it: they have a point. They know we love them for their accents . . . that a British man can be pimply, broke, and rude, and yet an American woman will fawn over him, favor him without question over one of her own countrymen. But what is a woman supposed