A Burnable Book: A Novel Part 2

TWO.

Gropec.u.n.t Lane, Ward of Cheap Eleanor Rykener grunted, spat, wiped her lips. The friar covered his shrivelled k.n.o.b. Wouldn't meet her eyes, of course. Franciscans, they never liked to look. He dropped his groats on the straw. 'Why thank you, Brother Michael,' she said, her voice a sullen nip. The friar stared coldly at some spot on her neck, then shrugged on his cowl, edged around the old mare, and left the stall.

When she had dressed, Eleanor stepped out into the light rain, looking down toward the stone cross before St Pancras. The friar wouldn't give that a glance either as he slunk around the corner of the churchyard toward Soper Lane. She raised her face to the sky, cleansing his piety from her tongue.

'Regular as these little oinkers here.' Mary Potts leaned against a post, gesturing to a dozen pigs nosing street muck.

Eleanor tossed her gossip a tired smile. 'And never has the good grace to render me confession after I grant him service.'

They stood in silence for a while, watching the flow of late-afternoon traffic up along Cheapside, the creak of old wheels, the low calls of sheep, the urgings of hucksters, though the din seemed always distant from the ladies of Gropec.u.n.t Lane, a quiet byway of leased horsestalls and abandoned shopfronts that absorbed sound the way a dry rag absorbs ale, and as central as St Paul's to the human business of London. Every now and then this business would be theirs, as some desiring man, face to the ground, mind on slit, would make the turn and find a maudlyn to take his groats and squirt. Despite the lane's reputation, the girls kept things tidy, raking the dirt and pavers themselves, cleaning up after animal and man alike. It was their own small piece of the city, where jakes plucked coin from their purses and maudlyns tucked it into theirs, the ordinances be d.a.m.ned. A simple thing.

'Afternoon, m'pretties!'

Eleanor turned. Joan Rugg lifted her skirts as she hopped from stone to stone in a vain attempt to avoid the mud.

'What now what now what now,' Mary Potts murmured.

With a final grunt, Joan heaved herself on to the pavers fronting the stalls and straightened her dress, a shapeless thing of stained wool. The Dun Bell, Joan's girls called their bawd, with three chins stacked against her neck, lips full and always moist, beady eyes that moved more quickly than any other part of her, and a ma.s.s of matted hair entwined through the band of a wide hat she never removed. This, a splendid circle of leather and wool adorned with flowers of faded silk, had been given to her by a lover in her youth, she liked to recall. On that misty day its perch lent her large form an air of botanical mystery, as if the viewer were approaching a mountaintop garden above the clouds, or some strange, Edenic island in the sea. 'You ladies seen our Agnes?' she asked.

'Not today,' said Mary Potts.

'Thought you sent her up Westminster on Tuesday,' said Eleanor, suddenly concerned. As far as she knew Agnes Fonteyn had been consorting with one of the king's substewards, a long-time jake who would request Agnes's company for a few days at a time during royal absences.

'Didn't come through.' Joan raised her sleeve to scratch at her forearm. 'But I had a particular request for her this morning, from a fine gentleman of the Mercery. And a procuratrix'd like to make arrangements, right?'

'You talked to her mother down Southwark?' Mary asked.

'Sign of the p.r.i.c.king Bishop,' Eleanor added quickly, naming a common house in the stews where Agnes's mother had long peddled flesh.

Joan scoffed. 'Would've had to wait in line a half day to get a word in. That wh.o.r.e's swyving makes her daughter look like St Margaret.'

'Did you try her sister?' Eleanor said. 'Lives up Cornhull.'

Joan wagged her head. 'Took a peek in her fancy house, asked about a bit in Broad Street, but no sight of her ladyship.'

A dungcart turned up from St Pancras on the way to the walls, banded wheels groaning under the weight, the waste of man and beast souring the air. When the clatter receded, Joan turned back to them. 'Can't have my maudlyns vanishing on me, not with Lents about to pa.s.s, appet.i.tes built up as they are. Forty days of nothing, then a week of everything, in my experience.'

Mary groaned, her arms wrapping a post. 'Shoulda been a nun, shouldn't I, maybe took vows with them Benedictines?'

'Ah, but then you'd really be getting it in every hole, my dear,' said Joan wisely.

The two of them shared the laughter for a bit, attracting a few looks from other girls up the lane as Eleanor clasped her hands in worry. Joan put a hand to her chin. With a sidelong glance at Eleanor, she said, 'Agnes got a little spot, though, don't she? Out in the Moorfields.'

'A small walk short of Bethlem,' said Eleanor with a natural shudder. 'I've been there with her.' This was Agnes's 'lair', as she called it: an old hunter's blind outside the city walls where some of her wealthier jakes liked to take her, along with any other maudlyns they could cajole. They were, for the most part, young, reckless men with too much time and coin on their hands. Or fellows whose names might start with Sir.

'Go have a look then, will you?' said Joan. Her sweetest wheedle.

Eleanor hesitated. 'Rather not go alone.'

Joan heaved a shoulder at Mary. 'Take the child with you. Be back bell of six, or shortly after. Sky looks to be clearing, so we'll likely be busy tonight, the blood of London rising strong.'

Mary, playing the genteel, crooked her elbow. Eleanor took her arm, and they left Joan Rugg standing beside the stalls. 'Bell of six now,' the bawd called after them. Eleanor waved an acknowledgment, only too glad to escape her sticky work for a few hours, though quite worried for Agnes.

A muddy trudge in the drizzle took them along Cheapside past the Standard at le Vout, where two vagrants hunching in the stocks chewed at tack as a one-armed boy softened the biscuits in ale. A straight course up Wood Street and they were at Cripplegate. Eleanor looked up as they pa.s.sed beneath the gatehouse, the prisoners idling behind the high grates, the keepers giving the two mauds barely a glance. Agnes likewise would have strolled from the inner half of the ward to the outer without a second thought from these men. Strange, that she would have let off her work for longer than a few hours, let alone a full day; she seemed always wanting more shillings, the busiest girl on Gropec.u.n.t Lane and happy about it.

Strange, too, that she'd said nothing to Eleanor about her plans, for the two maudlyns had long been intimate, swapping jakes, lending a coin here and there, looking out for one another in their carnal trade, and always mindful of the situations that had led them to it: Eleanor, an orphan, her younger brother apprenticed to a Southwark butcher who beat him mercilessly; Agnes Fonteyn, who had fled her mother's bawdy house in the stews for a higher cut of her skincoin. Tightest yoke a' mauds you'll ever see, Joan Rugg liked to say, and it was true.

Once past Cripplegate they skirted the northern wall past the bricked-up postern at the foot of the causeway and soon came to the edge of an overgrown orchard. Here the lane opened out into the broad expanse of the Moorfields, a linked series of marshy heaths that formed London's nearest hunting grounds, mostly deer and fowl. A few drier, higher bits could handle cows at pasture, though for the most part the whole area was a fen. That late afternoon Eleanor and Mary saw no one moving among the high tufts of moorgra.s.s.

The first path off the causeway led to a spot beneath a large, lone oak. From there a smaller path branched off to the east. Ahead loomed the ma.s.s of Bethlem Priory, its walls heightened and b.u.t.tressed since the order started taking in lunatics the year before. Eleanor recalled her last visit to Agnes's lair, the mix of routine coupling and utter terror. The desperate gropings of an ageing squire, the loose spread of his gut on her back like a jelly blanket then a sound that shrivelled the squire's c.o.c.k, and her own as well: a lunatic's scream, echoing from the Bethlem walls. Since that night Eleanor had heard similar accounts of the priory's madmen, fighting their chains as the canons extended their charity to the wrong of mind.

Eleanor saw the white rock that marked the final turn. They pushed through the heavy foliage until they reached a high wall of hawthorn. A strong scent of primrose masked a sweeter, sicker smell beneath. Mary touched her arm. Eleanor held her breath and stepped into the dense brush. A flash of bare skin on the ground, glistening, moist. Eleanor pushed aside the last branches. They saw the body.

She was face down in the wetness, naked, her skin marbled with mud and rain. Her hair, caked in soil, had spread into three slicked highways from the crown of her crushed head, opened to the vermin. Beside her left hand lay a shoeing hammer, its handle resting carelessly over a root. Eleanor, in a daze, picked it up, felt its killing weight. As she stood feeble guard, Mary, with a heavy sigh, squatted in the mud beside the body. 'Oh, you poor thing,' she said. 'Oh, Agnes you were so lovely, oh my beautiful.'

'Turn her over then, get her face out of the peat,' said Eleanor, hammer still at the ready. Something didn't make sense. Agnes's hair- Mary pulled at the girl's shoulders. With a suck of mud she came free. Once she was flipped Mary used her hem to wipe the dark patches from the girl's ruined face.

They stared down at her, at first disbelieving what they saw. Eleanor glanced into the hunter's blind. A pile of women's finery thrown over a stump: an ivory busk, a taffeta cape trimmed with fur, more silk than she and her fellow maudlyns could ever hope to afford, all in a style that Eleanor who had a poor girl's eye for new jet, could tell you who in town sold the latest dresses from Ghent and Bruges had rarely seen in London. She looked back at the face.

This dead girl was indeed lovely. She was not Agnes Fonteyn.

THREE.

La Neyte, Westminster Wat Tyler. Jack Straw. The city as powerless as a widow, Troy without its Hector, the commons running like barnyard animals through her streets, taking her bridges, torching her greatest houses, storming the Tower and murdering the lord chancellor and the lord treasurer. Though it had been four years since the Rising swept through London, the memories still haunted our great but tired city, pooling beneath the eaves, drifting along narrow alleys with the continuing threat of revolt.

No one had been more affected by the events of those grim weeks than John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster. After stealing everything worth taking, Tyler and his gang burned Gaunt's Thames-side palace to the ground, and the ruins of the Savoy would sit along the Strand for years: a charred reminder of the brute power of the commons, and the constant threat embodied by the city's aggrieved poor.

Now the duke avoided London as much as possible, centring his life and his business around the castle of Kenilworth far to the north. When his presence was required in the city Gaunt would appear for a few days or a week at a time, the grudged guest of those magnates willing to tolerate his household, and betting on his survival. Often he would lodge at Tottenham, though that Lent he was residing at La Neyte, the Abbot of Westminster's moated grange a mile up-river from the abbey, and it was there I would be granted an audience with his sometime mistress, arranged the day before.

The duke himself was just leaving the abbot's house as I arrived in the upper gateyard, his retainers gosling along behind him. He half-turned to me, his brow knit in fury as he acknowledged my bent knee with a curt nod. Those around him knew better than to speak, as did I.

In the summer hall I moved slowly along the wall, mingling with the line of bored servants as thick hangings brushed my cheek. The chamber teemed with lords of various ranks who had been seeking a word with the duke before his abrupt departure, and I tried to go unremarked by those remaining. My eyes, uncooperative, failed to spy a drip bucket, full of rainwater from the porous ceiling. It surrendered its contents to my left foot, then clattered across the floor. There was a hush. It was Michael de la Pole who broke it in his graceful way. 'Not to worry. The abbot has ordered some silken buckets,' said the lord chancellor into the silence, giving me a slight nod. Laughter, though not at my expense, filled that portion of the hall, and the baron resumed his conversation.

Standing behind the baron, shifting a little as the hubbub returned, Robert de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, gave me an ugly look. I glanced away, though not before noting his discomfort. De Vere had likely been the target of Gaunt's ire, and now here's John Gower, come to brew more trouble, as if the particular group of magnates cl.u.s.tered in the hall at La Neyte that day did not promise enough. A duke, an earl, and a baron, a tensile triangle of mutual suspicion and dependence. Gaunt was still furious at de Vere for turning the king against him at the February tournament at Westminster, where a plot against the duke's life was only narrowly averted and this after all the business the year before at the Salisbury Parliament, where Gaunt's supposed plot against his royal nephew nearly led to the duke's hanging on the spot. The plot was spun of gossamer, of course, the invention of a Carmelite friar who was afterwards seized on the way to his cell and tortured to death. One year, two imaginary plots, and great trouble for the realm. De Vere, the young king's current favourite and a notorious flatterer, was taking every advantage he could of the widening rift between the king and the duke, gathering n.o.bles to his side in an open attempt to wrest power from the much older Lancaster. Caught in the middle of it all was the Baron de la Pole, chief financier to old King Edward and now lord chancellor, determined to keep the peace at all costs and, it appeared to me, losing ground by the day.

Oxford had now turned his back on de la Pole, suggesting that he had taken the chancellor's kind gesture toward me as an insult to him. Sir Stephen Weldon, chief knight of the earl's household, noticed his lord's vexation and excused himself. I set my face for the encounter. This took some effort, for Weldon's most distinguishing characteristic was a crescent scar on his chin, a jagged curve of whitened skin. Whenever I saw it I imagined a line of Oxford's wretched tenants hooked by their necks, swinging in the wind.

'Gower.'

'Sir Stephen.'

'Our fine town should consider itself gilded indeed whenever John Gower deigns to abandon Southwark to tread Westminster's humbler lanes.'

'Even as these avenues acclaim your own pa.s.sings through with their every voice.' How I hate this man.

Weldon a.s.sessed me, a peculiar glint in his eyes. 'You look awful, Gower. I'd thought it was your wife who was sick.'

I stared at his scar. 'Sarah died last year. The week of Michaelmas.'

He raised a hand to his mouth. 'I'd not heard.'

I said nothing.

'You must forgive me, John,' he insisted. 'It is inexcusable.'

'Though unsurprising, Sir Stephen.'

His eyes narrowed. He was about to say something more, then thought better of it. They usually do, even the higher knights. He inclined his head, spun on a toe, and rejoined the cl.u.s.ter around Oxford, leaving me wondering why the man had approached me in the first place.

Someone coughed, stifled it. Katherine Swynford was descending from the abbot's chambers, given over to Gaunt for the duration of his stay. Her skin glowed with the duke's recent departure, the cut of her gown too low by a coin's span, her hood trimmed in a silk brocade that matched her emerald eyes. Stretching her compact frame, she looked about until her gaze settled on me. With a subtle toss of her head she directed me to the wide oratorium off the summer hall, where a group of five other ladies sat at their embroidery.

'Why did you want to see me, John?' she said when I joined her. She glanced over her shoulder, already impatient.

I recalled Chaucer's anxious state at Monksblood's. You can't be direct with her about it. I opted against obedience. 'Apparently Geoffrey thinks you might know about a book he's seeking.'

She let me stand in silence, leaning over to correct a companion. 'Unravel that. Less of an arc, more of a triangle. Lovely. Then pin out the roet.' Dame Katherine never failed to amaze me in those days, commanding the d.u.c.h.ess's ladies-in-waiting as if they were already her own.

At length she gave me her attention. 'Always on the lookout for the next little book, isn't he?'

'Too true.'

'What's special about this one?' She took up a narrow strip of cloth of gold, which she proceeded to pick apart from the edges.

'It's delicate,' I said, hiding my ignorance behind a veil of discretion.

'Well of course it is, John, or it wouldn't be you standing before me but my own brother-in-law!' She continued to pick. 'What a worm.'

I silently conceded the larger point. Gaunt's subtle favouritism toward Chaucer was well known and had been ever since Geoffrey composed an elegy upon the death of d.u.c.h.ess Blanche some years ago. Katherine viewed him as an unworthy rival for the duke's attention. The current d.u.c.h.ess certainly wasn't getting much of it, despite Gaunt's vow after the Rising to forsake his mistress in favour of his marriage. The duke had seen the rebellion as a warning from G.o.d to put away his long-standing consort, and indeed for several years the two had succeeded in avoiding one another's presence, even as the duke plied her from afar with luxurious gifts, properties, and pounds. Now, by all indications, things were boiling up again, their liaisons increasingly out in the open, as they had formerly been for so many years.

Yet I remained one of Dame Katherine's greatest admirers, both for her restraint and for her admirable fort.i.tude in the face of so much calumny from her detractors. Despite what must have been nearly irresistible pressure from Lancaster, she had never broken her vows while her husband lived, even when Sir Hugh Swynford was abroad. That Lancaster was now breaking his own was the duke's problem, not hers. She seemed determined in those years to see him through another d.u.c.h.ess, whatever the cost to her reputation and prospects.

'So ... what makes him think the book is here?' she said, giving me a look.

'He heard it indirectly from one of the duke's hermits, so he says.'

'Oh? And did he bother to say which one?' She swept an arm toward the terrace doors. 'Lancaster has hermits to spare. Richard of Chatterburn, John of Singleton, Gregory of Bishop's Lynn David of the Ditch, Tom of the Tavern, Peter of the Privy, as common as friars. Dozens of them, popping their heads out of their holes like rabbits, sniffing for n.o.bles whenever Gaunt opens his purse.'

'He didn't say.'

Her gaze lingered for a moment. 'Will you play cards, John?' From a side table she removed a stack of parchment ovals.

'Cards?'

'You haven't played such games?' She spread the cards across the table at her knees, and I marvelled at the colourful shapes: blue swords, golden hawks, red plums, and purple thistleflowers, all arranged in differing numbers and patterns. 'They are quite popular in Paris, though this pack comes from Florence. A gift from Chaucer, and now it's my second.' She pointed to another deck, stacked neatly on the table, and to all appearances identical to the one she held.

I asked how the game was played.

'There are many games of cards; it seems I learn a new one every week.' There were four suits, she explained, each numbering thirteen. Pips from one to nine, then the four faces in each suit: the Prince of Hawks, the Duke of Plums, the Queen of Swords, the King of Thistles, and so on.

'Fifty-two cards in all, then,' I calculated.

'Plus the trumps, a dozen of them.' She laid out another row. 'The Wheel of Fortune, the Magician, the Bleeding Tower, and this is the Sun.' An exquisite rendering of Apollo in full splendour.

'What part do the trumps play?'

'They wrestle with the pips and one another in various ways, depending on the rules of the particular game.'

Like the queen in chess, I observed.

'Though the queen has worthy rivals.' She laid out more trump cards. 'Fate, the Devil, the Fool and, most powerful of all, Death.' A skull, leering at the viewer, the skeleton mounted on an emaciated horse. She explained the rules to a simple game involving points doled out for each pip and face card, with the trumps acting as foils. For some time we played in silence, and I noticed her agility with the parchment shapes, a sleight of hand that involved a deft use of her palms and knuckles to deal and reposition the cards in play. Eventually, as I learned the rhythm, I relaxed back into the conversation.

'Perhaps the Earl of Cambridge might know something about this book?'

Swynford raised a shoulder. She caught me looking at her bare skin, didn't seem to mind. 'Our dear Edmund Langley?' She played the Four of Hawks, a shrewd move, evidently.

'The Infanta and her sister are at court this month, I've heard.' The wives of Gaunt and Langley, the eldest of Edward's surviving sons. I went to take her four but flubbed my draw. She smiled as she swept the table clean in one movement and laid out a new play.

'Ah yes, the hermanas espanol. Those dark b.i.t.c.hes are my little h.e.l.l.' Swynford looked up with a worried smile. 'What a tangled web you spin for me, John Gower. Are you here to torture me or amuse me?'

'Your choice.'

She narrowed her eyes. 'Let's have a different game, a simpler one.' She picked up the cards again and laid ten of them face-up on the table. 'Choose one. Any card at all.'

'What determines my choice?'

'Merely the condition of your soul.'

Feeling mischievous, I leaned forward and tapped the Devil.

She puckered her lips. 'But that is Chaucer's card.'

We shared a laugh as she gathered the cards into a loose pile, though just as quickly her face clouded. 'I know something about this book.' She looked across the hall to the humming circles of gentry. 'There have been whispers of a theft. A strange ma.n.u.script, stolen from La Neyte last week.'