A Burnable Book: A Novel Part 13

'Let her in, Dawson.'

The young man bowed his head. 'As you wish, Master Pinchbeak.'

Pinchbeak gestured to Millicent to follow him, and she matched his slow progress toward the far wall of the parvis. He walked with a stick, topped by a carved skull of ivory that looked small beneath a ma.s.sive hand, which belied his compact frame. He didn't look at her until they had taken a seat, and he said nothing once they were settled, merely raising an untamed eyebrow.

Millicent reached into her bodice and removed her medal, the silver replica of St Leonard that still identified her with Bromley. She displayed it for Pinchbeak. His expression softened. 'As you see, Master Pinchbeak,' she began, 'I was once a poor laysister of St Leonard, no more than a peeler of roots to that great house. Yet I come to beg the indulgence of a lawman famed across England for the wisdom of his counsel.'

Pinchbeak, ignoring her flattery, studied her face, his gaze wandering freely over her features and down to her breast. 'We've met before.'

'I don't believe so, Master Pinchbeak,' she quickly said. She stole a glance at his collar, a band of chained silver about his neck with a pendant badge below, bejewelled with the livery of his affinity: a single white star, opposed fields of gold and red, the whole surrounded by ornate tangles of vines, leaves, and flowers, the subtlest metalwork to be had in London. The gifting of this collar had been a sign of singular distinction, marking Pinchbeak as a prestigious member of that extended network of knights, squires, freemen, and servants...o...b..ting Robert de Vere, Earl of Oxford.

Pinchbeak tilted his head. 'I'm rarely wrong about such things. But no matter. State your business. Always happy to help out a sister of Bromley, whether lay or avowed.'

She spoke of the book. His face remained impa.s.sive as she described the volume and its poetry, the dark histories inscribed in its strange verses; the cloth and its heraldry, the incriminating livery woven in its strands. She recited the four bits of prophecy she had gotten by rote, including the one that mattered most, on the death of King Richard. She said nothing about the manner in which the book had come to her, nor about the murdered girl. This piece of the story, she suspected, might prove more useful at a later point.

All the while Pinchbeak observed her with a practised calm, his fingers steepled before his sharp nose. She could not read the lawman's eyes even as well as she had read the book, though in their depths she sensed genuine concern. The hollow of his neck created a dark well of stubbled skin that pulsed as he listened. She was watching a vein throb beneath his chin when he finally spoke.

'To whom else have you uttered these lines?' He leaned forward slightly.

'You are the first,' Millicent lied. 'The very first, Master Pinchbeak.'

She waited. With a shuddering groan, the bell struck in the St Paul's belfry far above, wrapping Millicent in its deep throb and shaking her guts like jelly in a bowl.

Pinchbeak remained still through the last of the clamour, his gaze on Millicent far from kind. 'You deal rather freely with these prophecies,' he said into the final, dying tone.

'Though freely is not how I hope to part with them, Master Pinchbeak,' she countered.

His frown was severe. 'You haven't the devil's idea what unholy h.e.l.l you've dug yourself into, Mistress-'

'Rykener,' she said on an impulse, thinking of the Gropec.u.n.t maudlyn showing up at her door. Through the parvis gate she saw Agnes, lingering by the stairs. 'Eleanor Rykener is my name.' Her sister would flay her if she knew she had betrayed her friend in this way, yet giving her own name would lead the authorities right to her door.

'Mistress Rykener,' Pinchbeak said, attempting patience, though she could now see the cords in his neck standing out against his skin, which had coloured to a deep purple, 'I've heard noises from others about this book. A hideous thing, and if what you say is true, if you really have it, why, you've dug yourself a pretty little hole. The very words you've uttered in my presence the words alone are treason.'

Millicent subtly smiled. She had Pinchbeak just where she wanted him. 'Though they are not my words, good sir. Nor my treason described in the prophecy.'

'Not your words,' Pinchbeak said, sitting back. There was a challenge in his gaze, perhaps even a small degree of admiration. 'Yet whose words are they? That's the question, hmm?'

She shrugged. 'Though to my purposes a useful one only insofar as it aids me in their sale.'

'Your purposes will best be served by bringing this book to me. You'll receive a handsome fee, I a.s.sure you.'

At last. 'And the size of this fee, Master Pinchbeak?'

He thought about it. 'Four marks.'

Millicent sniffed. 'Four marks? Four marks, when a prince's ransom would hardly suit? Think of your own reward, Master Pinchbeak, should you deliver this book of prophecies to your lord. And the penalty should he learn that you were presented with the opportunity to recover it but failed.'

He sputtered for a moment, but he knew she was right. 'Let us be clear on this, Mistress Rykener. The line you quoted concerning the day of the regicide, the feast of St Dunstan. The thirteenth prophecy is clear on this matter?'

Millicent nodded and repeated the two lines: 'By Half-ten of Hawks might shender be shown, On day of Saint Dunstan shall Death have his doom.'

Pinchbeak rose with some difficulty, his right arm shaking on his stick. 'What's to prevent me from having you seized this very moment?' he asked. 'Here you are, femme sole in the presence of a serjeant-at-law, with no husband to shield you. Newgate is full of traitors this season, man and woman alike.'

Millicent had antic.i.p.ated this. 'I have made certain arrangements for the disposition of the book in case I'm taken, Master Pinchbeak. It's safely hidden.'

'I see,' he said, looking sceptical. 'And you intend to approach every prominent man in London with this book until you find one ready to snap it up?'

'Only those known for the keenness of their discernment. Their wisdom in making difficult choices.'

He gave her a thin smile, then leaned forward awkwardly, his breath warming her cheek as he wedged his stick between his chest and the parvis pavers. 'Come see me next Friday, Mistress Rykener, in my rooms at Scroope's, the serjeants' inn at Ely Place. By then I will have inquired about these prophecies. If I learn there is anything to them we'll discuss a suitable price.'

Millicent, delighted, rose from her bench while Pinchbeak turned away for the company of his fellow serjeants. She rejoined Agnes at the south porch and they headed back to Cornhull, talking excitedly about the fortune that awaited them. Though she felt a nagging worry that Pinchbeak's inquiries might lead him to spurn her offer, Millicent had been stirred by the encounter, and had no intention of waiting until the next week to inquire with Pinchbeak about his price. Why, the serjeant-at-law could make an offer for the book along with other gentlemen interested in its purchase. They had settled on the next wealthy man to approach when Agnes tugged her sleeve.

'What do you suppose he wants, Mil?'

'Who?' The turn for her house was just ahead.

'Man over there. Spicerer, looks like.'

Millicent looked to see George Lawler, standing before his shop and urging them over. He was agitated, his gaze shifting left and right. Arm in arm, the sisters crossed over and cleared the gutter. 'Yes, Master Lawler?' Millicent said when they reached him.

'Men've come.' He peered back into his shop. 'To your house, and also here.'

'Pratt, sure, and his son,' Millicent said. 'He'll have what I owe him, as soon as I've settled with you.'

'Not Pratt.'

'Who, then?'

'Loy if I know. Constables? But not of our ward, that's certain. Had the long knives at their sides, no badges. Asked after the sisters Fonteyn, do I know them, know their whereabouts.'

Millicent gasped. 'The sisters Fonteyn?'

'Knew that one of them, the rich one, frequented Lawler's. With a fondness for sugared things. And that the younger one's a mau-' He stopped himself. 'Didn't know you had a sister.'

Millicent turned to Agnes, her fury rising. 'And how could they have known, Agnes? Spreading rumour of your famed chast.i.ty about the city, hoping it would burnish my name?'

Agnes stepped back as if struck. 'I been gone from Gropec.u.n.t Lane weeks now, Mil. So they're looking for me, looking for the b-'

'Stop!' Millicent cried.

They all turned at a harsh laugh from Lawler's shop door. Mistress Lawler, arms folded, taking it all in. 'Look at the shiny side of the coin, your ladyship,' she said as Millicent felt herself redden. 'Least now you'll have an honest way of working off your debts.'

Millicent turned and strode off, Agnes hurrying behind her.

'Never had a doubt about that one, Lawler,' she called to their backs. 'A maud's a maud, wherever she gets her pennies. Let that be a lesson to you, George. The wisdom of wives, deep as the sea is green.'

'Aye,' she heard Lawler mutter. 'And just as cold.'

They reached the corner. Millicent had to force herself to place one foot in front of the other.

'Mil,' said Agnes, working to keep up. 'Mil, what if the men are still about? Shouldn't we get away from here?'

The visitors had been thorough in their inquiries. It seemed London's entire cloth industry was staring at them as they slunk past the colourful displays and hangings lining the lane: dresses, smocks, hoods, coverlets, and a host of other goods that now made Millicent feel trapped by the opulence rather than a part of it. Finally they reached her house.

The door stood ajar. Heedless of Agnes's warnings, Millicent entered, surveying the destruction. In the front room, chair cushions had been torn apart, feathers and straw scattered across the floor, wooden shelves torn from the walls, leaving gaping holes in the plaster; in the kitchen larder, already-empty barrels were broken on the floor, her recent purchases from Lawler's studding the rushes. She raced up the back stairs and into the rear bedchamber. Her trunk lay in pieces, hacked apart with an axe or sword. It seemed that nearly every garment she still owned had been sliced in two and tossed about the room.

She turned to Agnes, who had followed her up the stairs. 'Dearheart,' Agnes said, holding out her arms.

Millicent pushed her away. 'This is on you.' Her fall from wealthy consort of a peer to penniless sister of a Gropec.u.n.t Lane wh.o.r.e had been short but steep; now it was complete.

'But, Mil-'

'Shut it, Ag.' Millicent's hands shook as she gathered up those few items that were whole and stuffed them in a handled basket she kept for laundering.

Agnes was peering down at the street through a gap in the front shutters. 'They'll be after us, sure. Folks are already staring up here, lot of talk in the street.'

Millicent nodded tightly. 'We'll go then,' she said. They left her house for the last time, stealing along the alley to Spinners Lane. There they paused as Millicent adjusted the load and hefted the light basket that contained all her earthly possessions: an extra bonnet, two faded dresses, the few shillings left from selling the dead woman's bracelet, and the book, still wrapped in its cloth.

There was only one place to go, a destination neither of them had to name. They walked silently to the river and over the bridge, then made the turn past St Mary Overey. Millicent felt her shoulders sag with defeat, and as they entered Rose Alley it seemed that every raw moment of her former life as a maudlyn a.s.saulted her with a thickening of memory and shame.

The neighbourhood hadn't changed a bit. Same drab storefronts and sagging overhangs, looming over the lane like sullen birds of prey. Same sluggish gutters, carrying filth from house to pond and pond to river, filling the air with the stink of dead fish and tired wh.o.r.es. Same forlorn women and girls affecting cheer as they peddled their flesh to tradesmen, friars, and worse. No better than slaves, Millicent thought, and though I swore I would never return, now I'm all but one of them again.

She glanced over at Agnes. Her sister walked tall, no shame on her face, appearing almost excited to be coming back to their childhood home. The strength of the girl, Millicent thought. Where does she get it?

Finally they were in front of the p.r.i.c.king Bishop. Millicent nearly gagged at her first sight of St Cath, the spirals and slashes of withered skin. The old woman looked at Agnes, then at Millicent, letting her wizened gaze wander slowly over her b.r.e.a.s.t.s and down to her thighs and feet.

St Cath snickered, bobbing her chin. 'It'll be an honour, Lady Queynt, an honour to put your fair cheeks and teats to work again for the Bishop. Bess'll be thrilled.'

'Thrilled and gashed and swyved,' said Bess Waller, appearing at the door. Millicent looked at her mother's face for the first time in five years. More lines in her skin, more grey dusting her hair, but the Southwark bawd was as fetching as ever.

Agnes seemed about to say something but Bess held up a hand. 'Middle back room up top. Yours for a fortnight, but after that it's suck or scram. Hear?'

'Yes, mere,' said Agnes, nodding dutifully.

Millicent could not make a sound. Her mother stared at her with something between pity and contempt, then let out a thin whistle. 'My, my, my. How the wheel of Lady Fortune turns.'

Millicent gritted her teeth and pushed past her mother, entering the p.r.i.c.king Bishop and hating herself for having to.

TWENTY-ONE.

St Mary Overey, Southwark We quickly settled into a pattern. Always an early riser, I nibbled at bread in the kitchen, where I would sit by the hearth until Simon came in from the hall. We would exchange a few words, he would eat a little something, then he tended to go to the solar to read or scratch on a tablet for the rest of the morning. The first few days he never left the house. I would catch him staring vacantly out of a window, or sitting in a dark study by the hall fire. Invariably his smile would return when he noticed me, and soon enough he would start peppering me with questions about my affairs. He wanted me to take him to St Paul's and Westminster, where I could introduce him around. Despite my reluctance I gave in the third time he asked.

Simon had a new and easy way about him, open yet respectful as we spoke with these familiar clutches of lawmen and bureaucrats. He never seemed too free, his bearing modest and unpresumptuous, and I began to think these changes in him were genuine. Within days of his return to Southwark Simon was simply there, my natural son and only heir, more a part of my daily life than he had ever been before that night on the wharf. If his crimes were not forgotten they had diminished with time, miniaturized, I suppose, by the simple fact of his presence, and the brittle persistence of his mother's last words.

There is a particular image of Sarah that can slip from my memory for days or weeks at a time, only to reappear at the most unguarded moments, taking away my breath, nibbling at my conscience.

It was Epiphany time, over fifteen years ago now. We had lost Elizabeth to fever the week before, this after the death of John, our eldest, that autumn. Now our two younger children, Alison, eight, and Simon, just shy of six, had fallen ill. Simon's birth had been difficult. There would be no others. Unable to sleep over the rattles of his troubled breaths, I had crept from the lesser bedchamber down to the parlour, using the outer staircase so as not to disturb Sarah.

My feet were carelessly bare. I remember the rough edges of cold stairs, the indifference of a January moon. In the parlour I slouched on a long bench against the western wall, thinking blankly of our dead, our barely living. At some point I drifted off.

When I awoke Sarah was at the east window, framed against the night. We would often leave that window unshuttered, as it gave on to the far corner of the churchyard, and was thus in that part of the Overey house that lay within the priory's walls. There was a high stool there, nestled in an angled nook that allowed its occupant to lean against a broad wooden post. It had been Bet's favourite place to sit. Birds watering at the polygonal fountain, new buds on the gillyflower stems, Austin canons sneaking past to slip her a plug of mint: over this private world our elder daughter had sweetly reigned for most of her eleven years.

Standing there in her nightclothes, washed by a half moon, her mother looked like a gla.s.sed saint in a church window, pious and steady, every strand of her thick hair tucked properly beneath her night bonnet. Since our elder son died I had grown increasingly resentful of Sarah's composure, which seemed only to have strengthened with Bet's pa.s.sing. She would reveal nothing of her grief, greeting friends and family with a sympathetic smile and a warm embrace, as if they were the ones needing comfort. My own state over those months could hardly have been worse. I would find myself weeping at a moment's notice, bawling in a corner like a whipped schoolboy.

Not Sarah. Great in a crisis, our Sarah, it was said among the women of the parish. A new Job. She had always been so, a tower of womanly strength as she bathed the foreheads of the dying, comforted the living with rote phrases from the prior. That night, as I watched her stand before the window, I felt a flash of fury and wanted to shake her, to scream some feeling into that placid skull. Instead I simply sat, mute and still, as if nailed to the bench, diminished by my wife's stout quietude.

Then the contortions came. Her entire frame gave a single heave. A choking sound rose from her throat, stifled as soon as it began. This convulsed her further, her arms spasming like the bound limbs of a criminal on a noose.

Thinking she was ill, I was about to rise when she went to her knees and reached for the window. Her fingers stretched along the sill. She put her face to the bottom of the opening. Her cheek moved slowly along the rough board. I watched her, the strange sweeping movements of her hands as they whisked from the wood to her face, as she sniffed like some chained lunatic at her fingers and palms.

It came to me then, the meaning of Sarah's actions. She was gleaning the dust of our daughter. Discovering those places where Bet's hands had played, gathering the last particles of her skin, the final remnants of her scent as they lingered on the windowsill. As if to take them in, and store them somewhere until the two of them could meet again.

My breath stopped, yet I was too stunned by the change in my wife to go to her, despite the rush of sympathy swelling my lungs when I could breathe again. Sarah next turned away from the window and clutched the wooden stool. Flattening her cheek against the surface, she embraced the legs so tightly I thought she must be hurting herself. All the while she continued to draw indistinct moans from somewhere in her chest, which hummed with the pain of a dying animal.

Now she was p.r.o.ne, writhing on her stomach, clutching at the rushes. Now on her back, groaning at the ceiling beams. This went on for an indeterminate time until I thought she was done. She had curled herself against the wall, still heaving, puddled in grief. I took a deep breath, preparing to rise.

Then her voice, stealing from some shattered place, broke the room's silence. 'Not Simon ... please not Simon ... not Simon too ... oh G.o.d not my Simon not Simon not Simon not Simon ...'

I frowned. What about Alison? Why wasn't Sarah praying for our daughter, just as close to death as her brother? My thoughts darkened. Simon had always been Sarah's favourite; it was obvious from the moment of his birth. She had been a model mother to all the children, in her way. Yet our youngest she treated differently. Lifted him more often, shouldered his governess aside at night, gentled him in ways she never had the others.

It showed in him, too. Simon was a defiant, stubborn boy. Spoiled, coddled, contrary. Though astonishingly quick at his lessons, he could be an incorrigible brat, the object of numerous complaints from his schoolmasters and tutors, never willing to sit still and learn, whether sums from his teachers or bits of wisdom from his father. The very opposite of Alison, my child of light, seemingly born to please with her delicate embrace, her shy nods, her willing smile. She had been my only source of comfort over those awful months, as her older siblings died and her mother grew increasingly remote from everyone but her son. It was as if our family had been separated by some fathomless chasm, Sarah and Simon teetering on one side, Alison and I on the other, the voices of our departed sounding from the void, willing us to jump.

Yet here we are, still among the living, and we must manage somehow. The thought guided me back to the present. Despite the favour Sarah had always showered on Simon, I could not believe she would ask G.o.d for his life over Alison's. I waited for a prayer for our daughter. None came. Sarah continued her moaning for Simon, a thousand desperate pleas thrown into the night. Still nothing for Alison, not a motherly word.

I ground my teeth, close to screaming at her, cursing her for preferring Simon even at a time like this. Instead I remained silent, and channelled my fury into my own, darker prayer. No, Lord G.o.d, I prayed inwardly, take him. Spare her, G.o.d. Spare my daughter, I beg of Thee, and take my son. In the name of Your own Son, my G.o.d, grant me my daughter's life. Take Simon if You need another, so long as Alison lives.

At the time these words seemed only natural, a bid for Alison's life against her mother's wishes. I imagined our warring prayers mounting to heaven, curling into G.o.d's ears, and I felt a rush of righteousness as I asked Him for the life of my beloved daughter, at whatever cost.

Sarah never saw me sitting there that night, feebly watching the spectacle of her sorrow.

Alison died the next morning. My reaction was a tearless silence, as I shuffled about the Overey house, heavy with failure. Two days later Simon's fever broke and he was out of bed, jumping about as if he had never been ill. Instead of joy in his recovery all I felt was the bitter unfairness of it, that Alison should die so Simon could live. For it seemed to me then that Sarah had traded something for Simon's life that night, that some vital portion of her spirit had pa.s.sed into him with all those spasms and wracks and grotesque snifflings, none of which she had spared for Alison.

So I turned against her, against the good and against life, embracing the nothing that belongs to this world. She had G.o.d on her side, after all. She certainly didn't need me. That chain of early deaths pulled me from my moorings, dragged me downward into that amoral place where I have dwelled for so many years. Once a loving husband who doted on his wife, I became a reserve of cold severity, indifferent to the comforts of intimacy and the pleasures of the marriage bed. Once a fair and judicious father even to Simon, I became distant, demanding obedience from a son whose very life I secretly resented. Once a poet of youthful love, I became a scribbler of cranky moralism, my writing nothing more than a means of access to high men and hidden information, much as I had once wished to craft such things of beauty as Chaucer gave the world.

As for Sarah, Alison's death and Simon's survival seemed to have no effect on her, and as the years pa.s.sed and our sole child grew from a boy to a man, she remained unflinchingly loyal to him, even as he proved himself again and again unworthy of her indulgence, drinking in the street, consorting with maudlyns, boxing with labourers, trying his thumb on the blade of the law. It would come as no real surprise when his juvenile indulgences culminated in the killing of another man. A fitting turn in a life of such frivolous waste.

Then, within eighteen months of his departure for Italy and Hawkwood's service, another death. A shallow cough one day, a fever the next, and Sarah was gone. There was a moment near the end, as I sat beside her, when she reached for my hand, her own a patch of warm parchment, loose against my palm. I blinked at her fading eyes, leaned down to catch a ragged whisper. 'Try to love him, John. Just try.' My head bent in a feeble nod. She never spoke again.

Regret paints the memory in infinite hues, all blurring to a leaden grey with the pa.s.sing of time. What future would have become possible had I gone to my Sarah that night in our parlour, had I pulled this wracked woman into my arms, cleared her nose with my thumb and finger, helped her gather up our daughter's invisible dust? What could our remaining life have been, had I shown a half-ounce of compa.s.sion for this shattered mother, praying for one small life out of four?