The Evil-Shapen Coat

by Elendil, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

The table had no legs. Agnes Garth found that out on the first morning, when she crawled under it with a candle to look at the boards and put her hand into a square hole the size of a fist. There were others, spaced round the rim on the underside, each one plugged with a wedge of newer wood that had gone dark with damp and age. Somebody, a long time ago, had sawn the legs off and hung the top on the wall of the hall like a shield, and there it had stayed until the constable's men took it down and laid it face up on six trestles in the middle of the floor so she could paint it.

It was oak, and it was eighteen feet across. Walter had measured it at Candlemas, before he was ill, and written the figure on the back of the contract in his square black hand. He had also written XXIIII and drawn a circle cut like a pie, and under that, grene & white, and under that, the K. at the top. That was all she had from him on the matter. The contract was in Walter's name, and the money would be paid against his name when the work was done and passed, and Walter had been in the ground at St Thomas's since Lady Day.

"Can you do it?" the constable's clerk had asked her, the first day. He was a narrow young man called Ellis Rudd with ink on his second finger and a habit of standing on one foot.

"I've done the ground on every board Walter painted for nine years," she said. "I've done the letters on half of them."

"Which half?"

"The half that was straight."

He had looked at her a while, then at the table, which was the size of a small cottage floor, and had gone away to tell the constable that the widow would do it. She suspected he had put it more carefully than that.

---

She worked out the circle first. A pie cut in twenty-four was easier said than done when the pie was eighteen feet across and its centre could not be reached without kneeling on it. Hob, who was fourteen and had been Walter's boy for two years and was now hers, knelt on a folded sack in the middle with a nail and one end of a cord, and Agnes walked the other end round the rim. They marked the circle in chalk. Then she stepped it out with Walter's dividers, set wide, going round once, twice, a third time, closing them a hair at a time, until the points came back to the first mark exactly on the twenty-fourth step and not a barleycorn either side. She sent Hob for a lath and snapped the chalk lines from the rim to the centre, and the table had its spokes.

The ground went on the next day, and the day after: white lead in linseed for the white, verdigris for the green. Every second wedge green, all the way round. The verdigris stank and turned Hob's fingers the colour of a pond. The hall had been built by a king near three hundred years dead, and it was as tall as a church, and every word said in it went up into the roof and came back down a moment later, a little smaller. The castle dogs came in to watch. A pair of carpenters came in to mend a window and stayed to watch also, until the constable came through and they remembered the window.

The King's painter was to come from London when the ground was dry, and do the King, sitting crowned at the top in Arthur's chair, and the great rose in the middle, red and white. Agnes was to do the rest: the ground, the borders, the letters.

"What letters?" she asked Rudd.

He took a paper out of his sleeve. He had copied it, he said, from the printed book the Westminster printer had made of the deeds of Arthur, which his master owned and kept in a chest, and he had chosen the names himself with his master's leave: four-and-twenty knights of the Table, the greatest and the best known. He was clearly proud of the work. He gave her the paper with both hands.

She held it to the window. It was written in the quick, tangled hand the clerks used, all loops and hooks, with S for Sir before each name, and a column of twenty-four lines running down one side.

"Read them to me," she said.

"You can read them yourself, surely."

"I can read Walter Garth, painter and the Lord's Prayer and the price of white lead. These aren't any of those."

Rudd stood on one foot and read them to her.

He read galahallt and launcelot deulake and gauen, and she said each one over after him, because she did not want to paint a name she could not say. He read trystram and garethe and bedwere, and kay, which she liked, since it was three letters and would fit anywhere. He read mordrede, and paused, and said that Mordred had been the worst of them but you could not leave him out, any more than you could tell the story of the Passion without Judas. He read safer and lucane and plomyd and bors de ganys. Hob, kneeling on the floor grinding green, said them under his breath after Agnes, so the names went round the hall three times, getting fainter.

Then Rudd came to one near the middle of the paper and read it as if it were a single word.

"Lacotemale tayle."

"What's that?"

"French."

"I know it's French. I can hear it's French. What does it mean?"

Rudd looked pleased; it was the first question she had asked him that he could answer from a book. "It means the evil-shapen coat. It's a mock name. Sir Kay gave it him."

"Why?"

"Because of the coat." He came and sat on the end of a trestle, careful of the wet green. "He came to Arthur's court as a boy, wanting to be made knight, in a fine coat of cloth of gold. But the coat was cut all over, slashed through, and hanging in strips, and it sat on him crooked. It had been his father's. His father had been sleeping in a forest after the hunt, and an enemy came on him asleep and killed him where he lay, and the coat was the one he died in, with all the strokes still in it. And the boy swore to wear it as it was, unmended, until he had his revenge. And Kay looked at him and said, In mockery you shall be called La Cote Male Taile, and the whole court laughed."

Hob had stopped grinding.

"And then," said Rudd, "a lion got loose from its cage, and came at the Queen and her ladies, and the knights who were with her fled, and the boy killed it. And Arthur made him knight. And he kept the name."

"Kay's name?"

"He asked them to call him by it."

Agnes looked down at the paper, at the tangle of loops she could not read, where the evil-shapen coat was.

"Hob," she said. "Grind."

---

She did the letters with a pencil of squirrel hair, in black, beginning at the wedge to the King's right and working round with the sun. Before each one she chalked the name first, small, to see whether it would fit.

A circle cut in twenty-four makes wedges, and a wedge is fat at the rim and thin at the middle, so the names had to run inward along the spokes, the first letter at the rim where there was room, the last letters crowding toward the rose. S kay was nothing. S bors de ganys was a squeeze. S launcelot deulake went right down the wedge until the ke was almost in the King's painter's rose, and she had to rub it out and start again with the letters closer together, and then again because the letters closer together looked mean, and Lancelot, of all of them, should not look mean.

She did not know French and she did not know the clerks' hand. What she knew was the look of a word: its height and length, where the tall letters stood up out of it and where the tails hung below the line. She copied the shapes on Rudd's paper as she would have copied the shape of a leaf. Where Rudd's pen had lifted, she lifted; where his pen had run on, she ran on. In this way she went round the table in two days, one wedge after another, green and white, with the King's empty chair always at her back.

On the third morning Rudd came in with his master's face on, which was a longer face than his own.

"The fool," he said.

Agnes was on her knees on a plank laid across the table, finishing S lamorak. "What fool?"

"Dagonet. Sir Dagonet. I've put the King's fool on the King's table." He was holding the paper. He had been reading it, she thought, in bed. "He was Arthur's fool. Arthur loved his jests and made him knight with his own hands, and he went about the country riding at knights, and the knights laughed at him." He put a finger on the line. "I don't know how I came to copy him. I think I wanted twenty-four and I'd counted only twenty-three."

"He's painted," said Agnes.

"Then paint over him."

She sat back on her heels and looked at the wedge in question. It lay between S Ectorde marys and S degore, and Dagonet's name lay along it in black, still with the shine of the oil on it. The ground under it had taken three days to dry. To strike him she would have to scrape back to the wood, or near enough, and lay the ground again, and wait, and the King's painter was due on the road from Basingstoke tomorrow or the next day, and the King's painter was not a man to stand about on one foot while a widow's ground dried.

"Who goes in his place?" she said.

Rudd opened his mouth and shut it.

"Because I'll want the name," said Agnes, "now. Before I scrape. And I'll want to know how long it is."

He went away to look in his master's book. He came back at noon with three names on a fresh paper and no great happiness about any of them. One was so long that Agnes laid the paper against the wedge and showed him: the last half of it would have to be painted on the rose. One was a knight he had heard of only in that one book, and the third was a knight he had heard of and did not much like.

"And I'll tell you something," said Agnes. "He doesn't need to be famous. He needs to be four letters shorter than that."

"It isn't a question of length."

"It is for me."

He stood a long time over the table, reading round it, his lips going, the way a man reads a will to see if he is in it. He came to the wedge of the evil-shapen coat, and stopped.

"That's wrong," he said.

"It's what's on the paper."

"It's two words. La cote male, and then taile. Or it's four words, really. You've run it into one." He bent over it. "Lacotemale. It's like a man's name. It's like a place in Cornwall."

"I painted it as you wrote it." She found his paper and held it up beside the wedge. There it was in his hand: a long running tangle, with no lift of the pen anywhere in it until the tayle. Rudd looked from the paper to the table and back, and then put the paper behind his back, as if that helped.

"I was writing fast," he said.

"I expect Kay was talking fast."

He did not laugh, but he did put his foot down. He stood on both feet for some time, looking at the wedge and the black letters, S lacotemale tayle, the whole of the boy's mockery in a word nobody had ever spoken, which no Frenchman would know and no Englishman would have made.

"Leave it," he said finally. "Nobody in Winchester reads French."

"The King reads French."

"The King," said Rudd, "will be looking at the King."

---

The King's painter came the next afternoon with two men and a cart. He was a big, quiet person in a good gown with paint on the cuffs, and he walked round the table once, slowly, and nodded at the green and the white. He did not look at the names. He had a cartoon of the King's face pricked through on a sheet of paper, and his men pounced charcoal through the holes onto Arthur's place, and in a quarter of an hour there was a crowned man sitting in dots at the top of the circle, with a sword in one hand and an orb in the other. He sat in the dots like a man who has been told to keep still.

Rudd had come to watch. He stood beside Agnes at the rim, near the wedge with the fool in it.

"I asked my master," he said, low. "About Dagonet."

"Yes?"

"He said there's a fool at every king's table, and the wise king seats him where he can see him."

"Was that the master's own, or out of the book?"

"I don't know," said Rudd. "I didn't like to ask." He was quiet a while. "He laughed a great deal, saying it."

The King's painter's men had begun on the rose. It went on from the centre outwards, red over white over red, and as it went on it came up to the ends of all the names where they ran in. Agnes had planned for that, and left room, all except Lancelot's ke, which the red touched a little; you could still see that it was there.

Hob was sitting on the floor against the wall with his knees up and the paper on them, the copy of the names in Rudd's hand. He was saying them over again, one after another, very quietly, going round the circle as she had painted them. He had them nearly all by heart now. When he came to the coat he said it the way Rudd had first read it, and the way the paper had it and the table had it, all in one breath: Lacotemale. He said it the way you say a name.

---

They put the table back on the wall a week before the King came. It took the constable's men, both carpenters, the King's painter's two men and a winch, and it went up the end wall of the hall slowly, face out, with men shouting at each other, until the hooks took it and it hung there above the dais like a great painted clock. Once it was up there, nobody could read the names from the floor. The King, who would sit beneath it, would have his back to them. God, who sat higher, could presumably read them all.

The evening before they raised it, Agnes went back into the empty hall with a candle and her small black pot and the squirrel pencil, and got down on her back under the trestles.

It was dark under there and it smelled of old oak and dust and the green paint above. She held the candle up to the boards. She had seen it the first morning, when she found the leg holes, and had thought about it since: near the rim on the underside, by one of the plugged holes, someone had cut marks in the wood with a chisel. They were the strokes carpenters use to tell which board goes against which, a straight cut and a crossed one and three nicks like a tally. Some carpenter, in a year nobody knew, had made them so he would not put the table together wrong. Then he had put it together right, and gone home, and left his marks where nobody would see them.

Agnes found a clean place on the board beside them. She dipped the pencil, wiped it on the rim of the pot, and with the candle wax dripping on her wrist, lying on her back in the dark under King Arthur's table, she painted in Walter's square black letters, as he had taught her to paint them, W. GARTH.

Then she lay there until the candle had burned down near her fingers, watching the wet black letters shine beside the old carpenter's cuts.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum Nōnās Octōbrēs (2 October 2026), ab Elendile per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Elendil, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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