A Burnable Book: A Novel Part 22

Reaching the cross above the Puddle-wharf, she peered down upper Thames Street into the rising dawn. A narrow slice of river glistened in a thin, red line. A heavy breeze from the waterfront pushed her skirts hard against her legs. The bells of St Andrew-by-Wardrobe rang Prime. Few Londoners moved along the broad, unpaved expanse wending down to the water.

She heard a shuffled foot on the pavers, then the roll of a kicked pebble, ticking against the base of the cross. At last, she thought. She took a last turn around the cross and lifted her head with a ready smile.

Eleanor Rykener, her arms folded on her narrow chest, wide eyes flashing in the dawn. 'What's this, then?'

'I'll have none of your suspicion, Eleanor Rykener,' Millicent shot back. 'Look at yourself, why don't you? Taken to following me, tracing my every step.'

'Only when your steps lead the rest of us under the wagon,' Eleanor retorted. She looked her up and down. 'Where is it?'

'Where is what?' Millicent said, not meeting her eyes.

'The book, you cold s.l.u.t.' Eleanor took a step toward her. 'Where is it? Brought it here to sell, did you?'

'And if I did?' said Millicent defiantly.

'Then we'll have it back, sure,' said Eleanor. Another step. 'And now.'

From around the corner of St Andrew's came a loud flock of sheep, bound for the Friday markets at Smithfield. A river of wool flowed around them as a boy slapped at flanks, his dog skirting the flow in a wide semicircle, nipping with the confidence of an earl. 'c.u.mbiday, c.u.mbiday,' the boy called to a few lingerers. In the wake of the sheep walked a man Millicent recognized immediately.

'Watch, now,' she warned Eleanor. The man followed the sheep to the top of St Andrew's Hill, making directly for the cross.

He was no less than a barn's width from the cross when Millicent remembered who he was. Not Pinchbeak but the rude young man from the porch of St Paul's: that gutter spitter who'd tried to bar her entry from the parvis. He stopped ten feet in front of them, hands at his sides, and gave a mocking bow as the last of the flock pa.s.sed by. 'Fair ladies,' he said, his contempt undisguised.

'Your name,' said Millicent. 'Say it.' He had come alone, it appeared.

'Robert Dawson,' the man said with a pompous air. 'Steward to Master Thomas Pinchbeak, serjeant-at-law in the service of King Richard. You have the book?'

'You have the coin?' Millicent shot back.

Dawson reached into a pocket and withdrew a small sack. He jangled it before her, the coins within mixing dully. He tossed it on the pavers between them. 'Direct from Master Pinchbeak himself. Forty marks, all in gold n.o.bles and halfs.'

Forty marks. Not a fortune, but easily enough to lease a house in Cornhull or anywhere else for a long while, keep them all in food and clothing, purchase their way into a craft of some kind as seamstresses, embroideresses, or what have you and take on their own apprentices. Enough to buy a new life.

Millicent felt her shoulders relax for the first time in months. Such a sum was unimaginable for a book, no matter its content. There must be great and wide belief in these prophecies, she reasoned, or a man like Thomas Pinchbeak would never offer such an exorbitant price. 'What do you think?' she said, turning to her still-hostile companion. 'Forty marks a suitable sum for our effort, and our prize?'

Eleanor glared at her. 'Though if forty, why not a hundred?'

'A good question,' said Millicent, turning on Dawson, feeling giddy. 'Why not a hundred marks, Robert Dawson?'

'Forty marks, says the serjeant, nor a penny more, my lovely ladies.' He leered at them in a manner that stretched his face to look like one of those stone monsters on St Paul's.

'Very well.' Millicent reached into a side pocket and pulled out the book. The embroidered covering was smooth in her hand, and as she palmed it she realized neither she nor Dawson had mentioned it as part of the exchange. As casually as she could she untied the thong and stuffed the cloth back into her pocket. She took a step toward the man and held out the ma.n.u.script.

Dawson flipped through the book, then slipped it into a pouch at his side. He said nothing about the cloth. Dawson looked at Millicent for a moment, his eyes narrowing in amus.e.m.e.nt. With a nod, he turned from them and made his way past the cross and up Thames Street, soon disappearing along the ward's dim byway.

'Well, pillory me,' said Eleanor, shaking her head as she looked after him. She turned to Millicent with a look of bewilderment. 'Forty marks.'

'Forty marks,' Millicent repeated, squatting for the pa.r.s.e. With the coin in hand, she allowed herself to feel some affection for her sister's wily companion, and of regret for endangering her life. For Eleanor had come through her own h.e.l.l: forced out of her livelihood, pursued through the streets of London half-starving, she'd stolen a book from a brothel and found a corpse in a churchyard and yet here she was, still standing, about to receive a small fortune. Feeling generous, Millicent shook the purse. 'And a third yours, Eleanor Rykener. Thirteen marks and change? That's a lot of c.o.c.k, if memory serves.'

Eleanor smiled grudgingly, and together they walked back toward the precincts of Aldgate. 'You were right all along, I suppose,' said Eleanor. 'What do we do with all that coin, now we got it?'

'We'll buy us some finery, purchase our way out of this pottage,' said Millicent. 'I'll teach you and Agnes to speak like ladies instead of mauds, find you a squire to share between you. Agnes will have him on even days, you on odds, and you'll hump him together at the Nativity, Easter, and All Saints. How's that?'

They stepped up Fenchurch toward the walls, neither of them giving mind to the moral charge Agnes had placed on them. To save our king. Yet in the presence of all that gold, now clutched in Millicent's hands and filling their minds with heady visions of new lives, it was all too easy to forget the dark prophecies whose writing and sale had put the heavy purse in their possession. Millicent listened with a new contentment as Eleanor spoke of a future that now seemed miraculously possible. 'Maybe I'll become a chandler, and Gerald'll cut me out the fat sheep fat, cow fat, pig fat, goose fat, goat fat and our candles'll be purchased up and down Cheap and Cornhull, maybe even Calais, why not, and by priors and canons and merchant taylors and all of them.'

As Eleanor spoke of her dreams Millicent untied the heavy purse. As soon as her fingers grazed the first coins she knew and should have known earlier, during the handoff, when these coins had echoed not with the bright ting of gold, but with the deadened clank of lead. She pulled one out and bit it, leaving toothmarks across its centre.

As she clutched the worthless plug her hands began to shake, yet she said nothing to Eleanor, who walked before her with the bounce of imagined wealth in her step. But when? When should she tell her, and tell Agnes, that she had traded their only hope for a bag of lead, fit for the lining of a conduit, or the smelting of a cheap cross for a country church?

They had reached Ditch Street. Millicent looked up through her tears and into an unearthly scene. A large crowd had a.s.sembled in the small patch of dirt before Bess Waller's tenement. From the conversation around them they gathered what had happened. A woman's scream in the dark the neighbourhood roused, lanterns put alight in the rising dawn, the hue raised around the ward against a fleeing man, though no word yet on the outcome of the pursuit.

As they watched dumbly from the edge of the crowd, the victim was borne out to the street, a spill of golden hair, a river of crusting blood along a whitened arm and a reddened hand that seemed to beckon them forward.

Agnes.

Millicent pushed through the crowd and grasped her sister's arm. Eleanor cradled her head, and the crowd pressed in around them.

'Doovay leebro. Doovay leebro,' Agnes moaned.

'Oh, Ag-'

'The the crochet, Mil,' said Agnes. 'Doovay leebro. It was him.' She raised her hand to her chin, then looked into Millicent's eyes, her own now delirious with pain, and darkened with memory. 'The maid on the moor, her yelling at the moon like that. It's the crochet. His face. 'When father, son, and ghost we sing, of city's city's blade ...' Her eyes froze. A final breath.

Millicent heard a splintering keen as she sank to the ground, the sack of lead plugs making a dull thud beside her. A red dawn cast the tenements in a h.e.l.lish blush, and the sobbing was her own.

THIRTY-FIVE.

The Oxford Road Bone-weary and still five miles out from Newgate, I heeled the mare's flanks and caught up to Will Cooper. He handed me his skin, the warmed ale doing little to lift my spirits. I had left Southwark determined to ferret out the truth behind the prophecies of Lollius. Now, with nearly two weeks pa.s.sed and the work in hand, I was filled with doubt. Clanvowe had stunned me with the revelation that he had made a copy of the De Mortibus after it fell into his hands in London. Yet the knight had offered little advice on what to do with the volume.

Surrender the book to the agents of the king? Hardly: even its possession put me in a perilous situation given the current factionalism in the realm. In my saddlebag was a book that imagined the violent demise of England's king, a work enumerating royal deaths just as Swynford's cards enumerated fates. Despite reading the work a dozen times, I still had not puzzled out the link between the poem and the cards, and there was much in the thirteenth prophecy that made no sense though some of its words danced before my eyes with a taunting clarity. Long castle will collar and cast out the core. It was with this line, and all it implied, that I would begin my return to the city.

As the towers of Westminster loomed before us, I ordered Will ahead with our packhorse. 'I'll be at Overey for a late supper. Ask Simon to join me after the Angelus bell.'

'As you wish, Master Gower,' said Will.

By dusk I was in Guildhall yard. Ralph Strode, as I'd expected, was in. I gave him Quincey's greetings from Oxford. He bent to remove a bottle from a chest at his feet, then poured us a jar of dark wine before easing his bulk on to a chair that groaned with the accommodation.

I looked at him. 'I have the book, Ralph.'

Strode tilted his head, frowned. 'The book.' His eyes widening. 'You mean the book of-'

'Liber de Mortibus Regum Anglorum. I have it, Ralph, and I don't know what to do with it. Nor with myself.' I set Clanvowe's ma.n.u.script on the desk, where it sat for a long while. Strode stared at the leathern cover as if the book were a dead pig in his bed. At last he sighed, arranged his candles, and opened it.

Ralph Strode was generally a sonorous reader, known to grunt and murmur while shuffling through the many depositions, writs, and other doc.u.ments that const.i.tuted the material regime of his office. Yet he read the De Mortibus in silence, the only sound in his chambers the rough whisper of parchment on his thumb. Finally he closed the ma.n.u.script and handed it across his desk.

'Your persistence is admirable, Gower.' Robed arms folded at his chest, a still width in the candlelight. 'You found it in Angervyle's library?'

I drank slowly, considering how much to tell him. 'The only whiff of a Lollius to be found among Bury's ma.n.u.scripts came from the works of Horace.'

'"Oblivion, dark and long, has locked them in a tearless grave",' Strode quoted Horace in Latin, his eyes dark and inscrutable slits. 'Of course.'

'That's right.' Though impressed as always by the common serjeant's prodigious memory, I felt, too, that Strode's reaction was skewed, as if I had offended propriety by bringing this book back to London.

'How did you get it, John?'

'It's a copy,' I admitted. 'Made by a friend of ours.'

He narrowed his eyes. 'Clanvowe?' At my nod he looked away. 'I thought I recognized the hand, should have suspected his role in all this. Sir John's connections among Wycliffe's minions are as deep as Lancaster's.'

'We have to take this to the mayor, Ralph, or the chancellor,' I said. 'St. Dunstan's Day is less than two weeks away.'

Strode pushed the volume across his desk and angled his frame toward the wall. 'Are you mad, John?' Closing me off.

'What?'

'I can't have anything to do with this. Nor with you, if you insist on taking this up the ladder.'

'But, Ralph, don't you see it? "Long castle will collar"? You and I both know what this means. You have to see reason here-'

'Reason?' Strode thundered, coming to his feet. 'You speak of reason, and yet you bring this poison into the Guildhall? This work has been circulating among agents of the French, John, I told you that weeks ago. And meanwhile you've been picking at justices, bishops, clerks, coroners, Lancaster's own wh.o.r.e, threatening them with G.o.d knows what so you can find it. To say nothing of the maudlyns.'

'The maudlyns?'

'The corpses are stacking up, John.'

'What corpses? What the h.e.l.l are you tal-'

'You've heard about Symkok?'

This stopped me. 'Nick Symkok?'

'Took a header off the bridge. An accident, Tyle's saying.'

The clerk for the subcoroner, the man who'd been feeding me some of my best information for nearly twenty years. 'He knew something,' I said. I'd seen it in his eyes that day at the coroner's chambers. Why hadn't I pressed him sooner? Then it got worse.

'And my man Tewburn. Asks a few questions around Southwark and gets a slit throat for his troubles.'

'James Tewburn is dead?'

'Murdered, Gower, and left for the birds in the St Pancras churchyard.'

'Ralph, I don't know what to say. Are you sure-'

'Now I learn you've been conjuring with Clanvowe, a known affiliate of Wycliffe and his strongest voice in Richard's affinity! Why do you think the man was sent off to Wales last week?'

'Conjuring?' I protested, rising and jabbing a finger at his ma.s.sive face. 'You listen to me, Ralph. I'm the one who's been trying to keep this whole mess from exploding in our faces. This isn't even the original stolen from La Neyte. It's a copy.'

'And all the more seditious for that,' he said, giving me a breath of the half-eaten pie on his desk. 'The talk of a plot against the king is growing more feverish by the day. Now you return from Oxford, from an evening with Sir John Clanvowe, of all people, with the work that sparked it all. I don't suppose Purvey broke bread with you? I hear he's in Oxford. But not even you could be that stupid, John.'

I hesitated.

'No,' he said, backing away.

'Wait Ralph-'

'Oh for Bart's skin!' he howled at the rafters. 'Where the h.e.l.l is your mind, Gower? Our nation is on the verge of war again, and you're dallying with budding heretics?' His breath slowed, his voice laden with quiet warning. 'Let's hope those buds don't bloom, Gower, at least not until Dunstan's Day is safely pa.s.sed.'

With that he dismissed me, his stony silence and averted gaze like twin weights on my shoulders as I left Guildhall yard. The hour was late, and I was badly shaken, in no state for another appointment that evening, though it couldn't be avoided. My suspicion had sharpened since leaving Oxford with Clanvowe's ma.n.u.script, and there was one line from the prophecies rattling my skull with the racket of rocks in a jar the line I had just recited to Strode, provoking his fury. Long castle will collar and cast out the core. The 'core', I was convinced, was cor, Latin for 'heart', and signified King Richard's personal emblem, the white hart. 'Long castle' was equally obvious: longcastle, longcaster, Lancaster a young boy could make the connection, and 'Longcastel' was a spelling I had seen on more than one doc.u.ment in Lancaster's own hand.

Worst of all, I had seen this bit of wordplay before. In another poem, an elegy, written some years ago after the death of Gaunt's first wife, d.u.c.h.ess Blanche. And in the great liturgy of information and deceit, coincidence is an unknown song.

I pushed on to Leadenhall, which I took to the city's easternmost gate, still open to the few stragglers making their way into the city from Bethnal Green or Whitechapel, their features alight with the torches along the inner gate. Aldgate loomed over me like a midnight eagle from its eyrie, its single eye a lone candle high above, shining through a glazed window that might have been Chaucer's parlour. The stairways and apartments climbing Aldgate created a labyrinthine ascent to the top, where I went down a quarter-stair and pa.s.sed through an arched walkway giving on to the high landing before Chaucer's apartments.

I took the heavy knocker in hand, intending to tap lightly, but the bronze lozenge escaped my grasp. A booming concussion echoed through the precincts of Aldgate. The heavy door opened to reveal the frown of a servant. The man looked me up and down, his face twisted with displeasure. I inquired after Chaucer and got a curt reply. 'Master Chaucer's away from London till Monday, sir, his affairs takin' him to port a' Dover.' Three days. I left strict instructions for Chaucer to contact me on his return.

Now over the bridge, the narrow way between shops and stalls. As I pa.s.sed the open parts of the span, the water rushing darkly below, my hand moved more than once to my bag; I felt a mounting temptation to cast Clanvowe's ma.n.u.script into the Thames and be done with the entire affair.

I knew something was wrong before I reached the gate to Overey close. Will Cooper stood just outside, a sputtering lantern suspended from his fingers. When he saw me he moved in big strides up the lane. One of his eyes was blackened. A line of blood had crusted on his upper lip.

'Master Gower!'

'What is it, Will?'

'They've taken Simon, sir.'

'Who?'

'King's men, looked like.'

'Whatever for?'

'Treason's what they said.'

'Treason?' My hand went to my mouth. The counterfeiting. Someone must have slipped news of Simon's transgression to an agent of the crown, and after all this time. As I stood there I vowed revenge even on Chaucer, if he proved my betrayer. 'Did they have a warrant?'

'Not's I saw.'

But of course they didn't. The thought chilled my bones. If they'd taken Simon for treason, a warrant would be unnecessary. He might already be dead.

'We had a bit of a struggle, we did,' Will went on, 'with two of 'em having to hold me back. I got a beating, 's you can see.'