A Burnable Book: A Novel Part 18

Broad Street, Oxford 'How much for the copying?'

'Three and two.'

'And the subwarden let you have it for the week?'

'"One of only two copies of Master Albertus in Balliol," he tells me. "Mind it well, young Pelham, mind it well."'

'And you will?'

'I'll keep it chained to my wrist.'

'And basted with your annotations.'

'Basted, roasted, ruminated-'

'And shat on s.h.i.tbarn Lane.'

'Into the privy of theology-'

'We call Balliol College.'

The three students erupted in laughter as they walked by, sparing no glance for a robeless Londoner seated on a stone wall. One of them looked a bit like Simon, the same sparkle of wit and ardour in his eyes, brains and charm to burn. They pa.s.sed beneath the arched gate into Balliol yard.

With a heavy sigh I rose, feeling, as always in Oxford, like the slow third wheel of a swifter cart. Though I had travelled here several times in recent years, I was neither a former student nor, like Ralph Strode, a master, my education having led me to the Temple rather than to Oxford or Cambridge. I knew men who had studied in both towns, Strode among them, and Chaucer always swore I could have been a fine philosopher or logician. But I had admitted to myself years before that certain dimensions of these disciplines were beyond me.

Though what, I wondered as I looked up Broad Street at yet another ruined facade, can come of theology when its greatest home lies in rubble? The town of Oxford seemed to have declined since my last visit into a haven of thieves and wh.o.r.es, stealing and swyving in the empty plots and fallow fields along the London road, keeping company with the hanged. Yet as the keeper of the inn at St Frideswide's had remarked, for every structure being pulled down outside the walls another two were going up on Cornmarket Street. Even the Durham monks had ambitions to expand their manse into a full-fledged college, with its own degreed faculty. As Will Cooper had observed to me on our way along the high street, Oxford was a confused town, it was plain to see: uncertain about its future yet eager to sc.r.a.pe away its pestilential past, caught in that strange land between decay and renewal.

I walked through the outer doors of the Durham hospitium as the monks were concluding Tierce. The voice of the abbot dismissed the monks to their work, and outside they broke up into smaller cl.u.s.ters.

One of the last to leave the oratorium was an old man in lay garb. His hose were cut tight around his ankles, tucked into rough boots that wouldn't have looked out of place on a ploughman. He wore a loose jacket of thin brown wool, unb.u.t.toned over a simple shirt dyed a dark red, and from its collar jutted a neck of remarkable length made all the more striking in contrast with its owner's head, which seemed to block the sun as he approached me from across the quadrangle. Though deep crags lined his brow, his skin lay drum-tight against his cheeks, as if pulled by an unseen force somewhere behind his ears.

'Master John Gower?'

'The same.' I half-bowed to the man. 'You are Peter de Quincey?'

'All my life,' was his reply. 'Come to sniff through the bishop's books, have you?' He asked a few other pointed questions, referring to the letter from Strode I had sent around the day before. Apparently satisfied, he led me to a far corner of the outer manse, where a narrow doorway opened to the dormitory pa.s.sage.

'Bishop Angervyle, Strode tells me, was a great man,' I said to his back.

'The greatest,' said Quincey as he stepped along the narrow pa.s.sage. 'His lordship served as the king's cofferer, as dean of rolls, as bishop of Durham, even as envoy to Avignon, to say nothing of his station as lord chancellor. A l.u.s.trous life.'

'Though I've heard, too,' I said, sensing his eagerness to expand, 'that Angervyle was instrumental in the deposition of the second King Edward. That he was forced to hide out in Paris for a time.'

A secretive smile over his shoulder. 'I will not deny it. He was a man of powerful a.s.sociations. An adviser and emissary to kings, emperors, and popes. But above all Richard Angervyle was a devoted collector of books. An ama.s.ser of books, one of unparalleled devotion. You undoubtedly know about the more immense holdings in our realm. Bury St Edmunds, St Albans, the libraries at Winchester and Worcester ...' We left the grange through a rear door facing on the walls. Fields and orchards beyond, workers toiling in the distance. 'And the great libraries of Christendom: the holdings of King Charles of France, the curial libraries at Rome and Avignon.'

'Yes, of course,' I said, thinking of Chaucer's account of the Visconti collection. Our apparent destination was a small, detached building positioned against the north wall and surrounded by a thick cl.u.s.ter of trees and shrubs. The building's walls formed a hexagon of timber and stone.

'Yet these libraries, while great in number, have no soul.' Quincey pulled a long key from its dangle by his waist; it reminded me of Tom Tugg's grotesque key to the Newgate cells, though more finely wrought. There was a click, then, with a reluctant breath, the door swung open on well-oiled hinges.

'Such collections,' Quincey continued as he stepped inside, 'are rich men's baubles, serving the purposes of vanity. Even the most sober monks regard their books as a reflection of their order. These men, Master Gower, collect books as the Duke of Lancaster collects palaces. And b.a.s.t.a.r.ds.' He gestured for me to enter.

The first thing I noticed about the dark s.p.a.ce was the smell: rich, deep, gorgeous. Cardamon, I thought, and cloves and cinnamon and old parchment, and leather, and boards, and dust. It was overwhelming; I had to step back out for a moment to sneeze. Quincey, meanwhile, had taken a pair of wicksnips from a shelf and busied himself lighting several new candles. Despite the opened door the room was not well lit, the shutters having been nailed fast. Old, rickety-looking shelves lined five of the chamber's six walls. All were empty. Angervyle's books, I a.s.sumed, were stored in the many trunks arranged around the room, of varying sizes and laid out like a labyrinth of low walls.

'You'll pardon the spice,' said Quincey. 'An excellent preservative of books.'

Though perhaps not in such quant.i.ty, I thought.

'Bishop Angervyle's library was different. Distinctive in every respect. Richard de Bury, you see, collected only those books that matter most to our modern minds.' He rubbed his hands and approached one of the closer chests.

'I've been told that the bishop was quite particular about his selections,' I said. 'No law texts, for example.'

Quincey nodded. 'The bishop had no patience for law, nor even for much theology, and those subjects he did favour did not exactly endear him to his superiors. The abbot here in Oxford and this was before Angervyle's elevation to the bishopric was unwilling to give over a room to his ma.n.u.scripts. He regarded the books, and also Angervyle himself, as vulgar.'

'Vulgar?'

'Supposedly it demeaned the order to be seeking out wisdom in the works of pagans. In lewd poems, in the spectacles of Seneca, even in the obscenities of Juvenal, one of his particular favourites. So here they are, left to rot in chests, with no dedicated library to house them, despite the talk of all the new building to come. I worry that these, these monks' he shuddered, as if swallowing a spider 'will ruin his legacy. That on my death the collection will be destroyed.'

I surveyed the chamber, wondering if Quincey would let me buy the whole lot.

'Or divided, with some books going to one college, others to another. The bishop's fondest wish was to have all his books housed in a single room, made available for lending.'

'So he writes in the Philobiblon.' I looked around at the many chests, feeling greedy. 'Did he make a catalogue?'

'After a fashion. But the bishop's own lists were organized into rather eccentric categories: books lending themselves to happiness, books sorting virtue from vice, books concerning animals. So I took it upon myself in the years after his death to systematize the collection. Even so, the handlist I've a.s.sembled leaves much to be desired, I'm afraid.'

He led me to a standing desk. On it was a volume of moderate thickness, its clasps locked, its binding chained to the wall. Quincey inserted a small key into the clasp lock, and the tight straps sprang apart at the buckle. 'Here, then.'

I peered down at the neat lists, alphabetized by the author's name if known, by the work's opening words if not. 'This will be enormously helpful,' I said as I scanned incipits.

'I hope so, Master Gower.' He modestly bent his stick-like neck. 'Though perhaps you might save yourself some time if you tell me what you are after. A particular work?'

'Well, I suppose you might know of the author I'm looking for.' I watched the man carefully. 'What significance does the name "Lollius" have to you, or did it have to Angervyle?'

'Lollius, you say.' He rubbed his nose, looking everywhere but into my eyes. 'Lolliuslolliuslolliuslolliuslollius,' he intoned, his voice running an unmelodious gamut from high to low and back again. 'Do I recall a moment in Petronius, perhaps, or was it Sall.u.s.t?' He squinted. 'Horace,' he said at last, with a snap of his long fingers.

'Horace?'

'Wrote a famous epistola ad Lollium.'

'A letter to Lollius?' I said. My hand twitched.

'And an ode. Do you know Horace?'

'A bit.'

Quincey walked to a trunk against the far wall and came back with a moderate volume opened to a middle folio. With a growing excitement, I moved to a position near the door and sat on a trunk to read the Horace as Quincey puttered around the chamber, dusting the empty shelves, straightening the trunks, fooling with the latches. Lollius, I discerned from the ode's first lines, was evidently a judge, consul, and well-regarded public figure in Rome. Horace had written the ode as a kind of promise to save the man's memory from oblivion. The lines were also a paean to good and virtuous service for the state: Horace praised Lollius for his keen sense of ethics in his work, bending decisions to the right, turning away from bribes, facing down death while spurning the rewards of wealth.

I turned the page and frowned. Where I had expected more lines to Lollius, a new poem began, this one the epistle to the same man, which the scribe had inserted between the two Horatian odes. I read it quickly. It largely duplicated the content of the first ode; the second was addressed to another man altogether.

Neither the epistle nor the ode said anything about Britain, nor kings, nor cards; not a word about prophecies, nor a.s.sa.s.sinations, nor conspirators. Horace's Lollius, as I should have realized when Quincey first mentioned him, could not possibly be the same man who allegedly auth.o.r.ed the Liber de Mortibus Regum Anglorum. The Roman poet was writing during the lifetime of Christ Himself, fully a thousand years prior to the demise of the Conqueror, the first kingly death prophesied in the De Mortibus.

No cause for despair, though. I had been in Angervyle's library all of a quarter hour and had already acquired a significant bit of information. I looked over at Quincey, who was inspecting a binding. 'Do you know of this Lollius's poems?'

He shook his head. 'Only his memory, and only in that Horatian ode and letter.'

'No other Lollius, then? An English one, perhaps?'

'Doesn't clap a bell, I'm afraid.'

'Though perhaps his works are mentioned elsewhere in Angervyle's library.'

'Anything is possible, Master Gower.' With this enigmatic reply Quincey set the volume back in its trunk and rose, brisk and businesslike. 'In any case, you're free to inspect the collection at your will.' He pointed to two trunks near my knee. 'These crates contain all the bishop's holdings in historia. Chronicles of England, of times past, and the writings of the ancient historians of Rome, Lucan and such. And here we have books of science.' Four trunks, arrayed against the western wall. 'Aristotle's Physics, treatises of Galen and Hippocrates, even the works of al-Kindi on astronomy and cryptography, translated from the Arabic.'

'Cryptography?'

Quincey gave me a queer look, his left brow edging up his broad forehead. 'The art of secret writing, Master Gower. Transpositions, ciphers. Such techniques are employed mainly by alchemists, dabblers in magic, that sort. And spies, of course.'

I felt a quiet thrill. Tom Tugg at Newgate, Ralph Strode at the Guildhall, and now Peter de Quincey here in Oxford, all quick to invoke the shadow of spies, unnumbered and anonymous, spectres of treachery and deceit in a time of war. I thought of the dead girl in the Moorfields a French spy, according to Strode and again I had the sense of a connection unmade, of knowledge hidden beneath veils I could not part.

Quincey soon left me alone in the chamber as alone as I could be with hundreds of books around me. I decided to begin with the histories, selecting four volumes from the first trunk and taking them to the reading desk. Settling on the stool and adjusting the candles, I arrayed the four ma.n.u.scripts before me, admiring the unique embossments tooled on covers of various shades.

No time for pleasure, I reminded myself. My king prophesied to die, and here I sit, plucking at chronicles. Secret writing indeed. First the Bede no, Geoffrey of Monmouth. With a sigh and a squint at the crabbed script, I read, my vision, for once, unclouded.

The strangers had arrived on the day of St Dominic. They departed on the Sat.u.r.day following the Feast of the a.s.sumption of the Blessed Virgin.

At first the lady would not admit the truth to herself, and in the early weeks it was easy enough to ignore her condition. The first time she missed her menses she put it off to the trauma of her rape, the evil humours the foreign prince had left within her. After the second time she examined her frame in a gla.s.s. Her belly was undeniably growing.

The daughter watched as her mother cursed her fortune, tore her hair, beat at her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. She swallowed anise, birthwort, chamomile by the mouthful, hoping with these herbs to abort the child. At one moment she reached for a knife, planning to tear out this foul life. At another she vowed to throw herself off a chalk cliff. Yet each time she would relent, unable to abandon her daughter.

Soon enough it became impossible to hide her condition. The lady sensed her people turning on her. Oh, they would still serve her, carry out her commands in their dutiful way. Yet she had lost their goodwill.

A lady in these times, bearing the child of a lord not her own? Unthinkable, and yet there she was.

With her sixth month came new tidings of the war. A miserable defeat for her lord's king, and as this bleakness descended the lady gave in fully to her despair. On the morning chosen for her death, she sat for a while in the outer courtyard, dandling her daughter one last time. The girl knew something was awry. Yet even as they kissed their farewells, they saw in the distance a cloud of dust, smaller than the last, moving slowly across the marches. The lady squinted against the scorching sun. Bevelled or and sable, six hawks argent ascending the middle rank.

The livery of her lord and husband.

The lady locked herself in her apartments and for two days would not see him, despite his pleas. Nor would his men nor his servants tell him what they knew, though in their averted eyes he read a calamity.

Had she been ill, with pestilence or some other malady? Was she sick even now, afraid to pa.s.s on a mortal blight to her lord? Was she disfigured?

Yes, the lady thought. Disfigured. She stripped to her thin shift and threw open the door, awaiting the sword.

Call to mind, my heart, the story of Joseph's trouble about Mary. It is not a story to be found in the Gospels, where Joseph thinks for a mere verse about divorce but then accepts the truth of the incarnation. I speak of the Father Joseph we see in the minstrels' pageants. This is the Joseph our knight knew best: the foolish Joseph, the husband convinced his pregnant wife has sinned with another man.

An angel came to you? Is that your claim? Ha! A man in the likeness of an angel, say I, come to cuckold me in sight of my relations and you, my fresh wife, claim to be carrying the Messiah, though still a virgin?

Yet even in this Joseph finally relents, his anger calmed by the angel into a cool acceptance of his fate as the earthly husband of the mother of our Lord.

The mores of the time dictated that the knight should have cast her out of his home, exiled her as a harlot and a wh.o.r.e. Instead he listened to his lady's account of her attack by this foreign prince. Though her swollen body was there for all to see, the knight would not put his wife away, as even Joseph was tempted at first to do. Wondrously, he wept with her instead, promising her his enduring love and protection.

It was not to be. On the Tuesday after Pentecost, in the last year of Pedro the Cruel's reign, G.o.d poured spirit into the body of an infant boy, and extracted it from the flesh of his mother. The little girl would hear her mother's death-screams for years to come.

The new child looked so much like his mother and, the girl could plainly see, his malevolent father. Yet from the moment of the boy's birth the knight took him as his own. One of the most self-sacrificing, self-denying loves in all history was this lord's for a son not his own. They made a strange family, these three, yet there was a certain n.o.bility to their devotion that inspired awe from more charitable souls.

Love can be sustaining even in the worst of circ.u.mstances. Bare life, though, can be pa.s.sing hard to endure. As the infant grew into a boy, the people started to look upon their lord with ill will. Betrayed by a strumpet of Mahound! And this b.a.s.t.a.r.d will be our lord's heir, and thus our own future lord?

No longer did they treat the knight with such solicitous fealty. There were whispers of insubordination, and gossip in the town.

The situation could not stand. So the knight gathered his most loyal men, no more than thirty in number, and with his children left their home. This best of lords gave up his castle to become a wanderer, a knight errant served only by the few dozen men who would join him on the road.

Though weakened in spirit, our knight was still strong in body, more than capable of leading a company of men in battle. He could sell these skills. He became a knight for hire, peddling the might of his men in the wars of that era, from the Straits of Gibraltar to the ports of Ma.r.s.eille and Toulon, adding other wayfaring men to his company as they went.

The knight taught his daughter well in the course of their wanderings: how to butcher a hart, how to fight with her fists and teeth, how to ward off brigands with a knife. By the age of twelve she was a fierce, rodent-like thing, unrecognizable as the daughter of a wealthy lord.

La Comadrejita: the Little Weasel, as she was known among the camp women. Small, lithe, quick on her feet, always sneaking up on the warriors and their women, dodging grasps and slaps, lifting coins and shiny objects from pouches and shelves. These she would give to her brother as tokens of their love, extracting solemn promises from the little boy that he would do her bidding in all things.

From her father's men his growing daughter learned the many tongues spoken around the great inland sea not only French and Italian but the languages of the Jews and the Moors, and the mixed tongue of sailors. She took a new name, too, after an old Roman town in the Dauphine where her father's company wintered one year, and after the orange scarf she wore in her hair.

For eight long years she roamed with her father's company among the hills and rivers of many lands. If not the happiest of girls, she was content, though the memory of her mother's ravishment stayed with her always, like an aching tooth too frequently tongued.

Sorrow comes in waves, it is said. In her sixteenth year the girl fell ill along with her father, her brother, and many of their company. The fever slew the weakest among them: a half-dozen ageing soldiers, two camp women heavy with child and her brother. He was buried on a high cliff above the sea, with no priest to say Ma.s.s. So she said it herself for this sweetest of boys, murmuring through narrowed lips those rote s.n.a.t.c.hes of unknown Latin heard so often in her life.

In his bleakness at the loss of his son, and seeing his daughter's devastation, her father made a decision. His child needed a home, a chance at a life worth living.

He had heard tidings of a large company of mercenaries serving the signore of Milan, a much larger a.s.semblage than his own, well managed and organized. So the knight travelled with his diminished company to Lombardy. There he sold himself and his men to this company, a wealthy band of mercenaries hiring their might to the most powerful magnates in the land: kings, dukes, popes.

The leader of this company was a fearsome lord, tall, haughty, quick of wit and quicker of cruelty. Yet he was revered by his subordinates, and feared by those who hired his engines and his men.

His name was Ser Giovanni Acuto. In your tongue, my sweet, Sir John Hawkwood.

TWENTY-NINE.

San Donato a Torre, near Florence 'It's remarkable, Sir John,' said Adam Scarlett. 'And alarming.'

Hawkwood, fresh from his weekly bath, had thrown on a loose robe. He peered into the mottled gla.s.s, shaving his neck. 'Perhaps it's nothing,' he said.

That morning a servingwoman and her husband had been cleaning one of the smaller villette to make room for an envoy from Rome. Four of the chancellor's clerks had vacated the week before, having made a mess of the outbuilding, and it needed a top-to-bottom scrubbing. Her husband had been shovelling old coals from the main hearth when he came across a half-burned quire behind the grate. The edges were badly charred, several pages rendered unreadable. Yet there were at least a dozen nearly full sheets with legible letters and mysterious signs scribbled across both sides. The man had promptly brought the quire to the condottiero.