A Burnable Book: A Novel Part 6

'Nor be Bess Waller none of yours.'

Edgar stood on his toes and peered into the doorway.

'Not a peek more,' said the woman, pushing away one of the cats and struggling to stand, 'but you proffer your pennies like the fine gentlemen of the parish.'

He snorted. 'For the love of St Thomas, woman, all I'm about here is looking out for Bess's daughter.'

'Millicent?' she said quickly. 'Hunting Millicent Fonteyn in the stews?' St Cath shook her bent frame and wheezed, wagged her small head. 'Won't find that knight's trull in Southwark. Best look up Cornhull for Millicent. d.u.c.h.ess Millicent by now, for all we knows over here.'

Edgar thought over the woman's response. Something about it didn't sit right. 'It's not Millicent I'm about. It's Agnes.'

'Agnes?'

Not this again. 'Yes, Agnes, you withered hag, sometime maud of the Bishop. Is Agnes Fonteyn about, or'd your witchcraft turn her into one of these cats?'

St Cath glared at her. 'Agnes hasn't been about since Epiphany time.'

'That's right.' Bess Waller, bawd of the p.r.i.c.king Bishop, leaned against the doorsill looking Edgar over. Despite two daughters and years of swyving, Bess had angles to her face that could only be boasted by the mother of Agnes Fonteyn; also the same lithe form, the same golden hair still radiant as she neared fifty. 'You're El-Edgar Rykener, are you not?'

'I am,' said Edgar. They'd met last year, soon after Agnes had left the Southwark stews and joined Joan Rugg's crew in Cheap Ward. Bess Waller had come after her younger daughter with a club while the bawd was away, trying to beat Agnes back to the Bishop, pleading the strength of family and roots. But Agnes had stuck to Gropec.u.n.t Lane, and now she was pure London.

'As I was telling your lovely serjeant-of-the-gate here, I need to have a word with Agnes. She about?'

'She's not,' said Bess. 'We miss her round the stews though, that right, St Cath?'

The old woman nodded. 'Miss her all right.'

'Agnes had the c.o.c.k lining up at the door,' said Bess. 'Something in the sweet air off her, that way she got with her head. That toss, you know?' She mimicked it perfectly. 'And always had since she's a girl. Sweet piece of sweetmeats, that one. Still sucking it off up Cheapside?'

Edgar rested a foot on the step, stretched his tired thighs. 'Our bawd's Joan Rugg.'

'Joan Rugg!' Bess cackled. 'Taught that fat hen everything she knows about the c.o.c.k. How to fondle it like one of St Cath's kittens here, how to clamp it atween her thighs for the while of a paternoster. The gentle c.o.c.k's your false idol, Joan, I tell her, and treating it right will bring you all the riches you can want. A fast learner, by St Bride. Just like Agnes.'

And what a homily to motherhood Agnes had in you, Edgar thought. 'So,' he said. 'Not a sight of her, then?'

Bess wiped her nose. 'Why you seeking out my Agnes?'

'Had some little business to pestle with her.'

'Business.'

'Thought she might've stepped over the river. If not, then ...'

'Then ...?' Bess raised her eyebrows.

Edgar took a step back, his gaze moving up the facade to the second-storey windows, one of them wedged open. A giggle, a slap, a moan.

Bess clucked. 'Best you be off, pretty boy. Got some gentlemen coming by next bell. Don't want my jakes inconvenienced.'

'I'm thinking the same,' said Edgar, also thinking there was more going on here than Bess Waller would reveal. He gave the bawd a meaningful look. 'You tell Agnes her Edgar come by, though.'

'Sure sure,' said Bess. 'Though could be Easter, could be All Souls all I know. But I'll tell her you were by. You give Joanie a Jesu palm on the a.r.s.e from her Bess, hear?'

Edgar turned and walked down Rose Alley to the bankside. There he paused and looked back at the p.r.i.c.king Bishop. Bess Waller's arms were in the air, her face beet-red as she let St Cath have it, for what he didn't know.

On the bridge he purchased a farthingloaf and pinched off pieces of coa.r.s.e bread, washing them down with some warmed beer. As he crossed the Thames he thought of the peculiar twinge of suspicion he'd felt on first telling St Cath why he was there. What was it about the old woman's words that had unsettled him?

Millicent.

Bess Waller's older daughter, Millicent Fonteyn, lived in a decent house along Cornhull, had some money and wanted more. She'd had nothing to do with her mother nor her sister for a long time. While Agnes had only recently left her mother's stewhouse for the streets of London, Millicent Fonteyn was no more than a distant memory on Rose Alley. Yet the moment Edgar had asked St Cath whether Bess Waller's daughter was about, the old woman had responded swift as you please.

Millicent? Hunting Millicent Fonteyn in the stews?

Which meant what? Which meant St Cath, fl.u.s.tered at Edgar's prodding, was covering for Agnes. He nodded, sure of it now. Agnes has been at the p.r.i.c.king Bishop, he thought; may be there still, the little tart. And who, he wondered for the hundredth time, was that poor dead girl on the moor?

NINE.

Westminster Two appointments set for that morning, the first with the wife of a disgruntled notary to the king's secretary with a copy of a royal writ to sell. We met in an alley above the stone wharf. She had brought a maidservant along for appearance's sake, and perhaps to impress me. As the servant dawdled at the end of the alley she sidled up close, wanting to flirt. She was an attractive woman, with soft curls peeking from beneath a loosened bonnet, full lips, cheeks pinched a bright pink, and I felt an unfamiliar stir that I promptly pushed aside.

'The writ?' I finally said, taking a small step back.

'Here, sir,' she said, offering it to me. The original, or so her husband claimed, had been sent under the king's own signet, a sign of Richard's increasing tendency to bypa.s.s set procedures in the administration of the realm. I read the hurried copy carefully, scanning for that useful detail. The king to Sir Richard de Brompton, greeting. I command you to do full right without delay ... A knight of Shropshire, a mercer of Shrewsbury, and a debt of nearly two hundred pounds. Yet I knew Brompton, a notorious debtor I'd had occasion to pluck a few years before. This was nothing new.

I shook my head. 'Sorry.'

She looked at me, a promise in her moist eyes. 'Not even a shilling, Master Gower?'

I suppressed a shudder. 'Nor a farthing, I'm afraid. But do tell your husband to be on the lookout for this sort of thing. You never can tell what might rise to the top. He knows how to reach me.'

She mumbled something, tightened her bonnet, then slunk off toward the palace with her maidservant. I followed them at a discreet distance and watched as they merged into the crowd around the south doors.

In the great hall I looked about for Ralph Strode, my second appointment in Westminster that morning, but when I reached our meeting place before Common Pleas at the north end a sudden silence swept the chamber. King Richard, in from Eltham Palace for the day, showing himself off. I went to my knee like every other man in the ma.s.sive s.p.a.ce, watching as the king came to the centre of the hall, paused with a practised deliberation, then gestured for all to rise and go about their business, though as always in his presence the talk was subdued. He wore long robes cut in the French fashion, a wide collar squeezing his thin neck. His fair hair, shoulder length and uncovered, swept from side to side as he spoke to his minions and those seeking a word. The king's impromptu entries into Westminster Hall were of a piece with his increasing love of ceremony, these portentous shows of authority that brought him in ritual touch with his subjects as often as he liked. If he caught your eye on one of these occasions you took a knee, no questions asked.

Yet there was a strange gentleness in the young king's bearing, a warmth of gesture and look I had never felt from his father, whose princely arrogance had surpa.s.sed even Gaunt's among old King Edward's sons. Though barely into his nineteenth year, this man had real reverence for the crown and its regal history, in ample evidence around the s.p.a.ce. King Richard had recently commissioned statues of England's past kings to be installed around the hall, with his own likeness culminating the series. The Confessor already stood in splendour against the south wall, his robes and crown gilded luxuriously, and a limner at work on his feet.

I leaned un.o.btrusively against one of the hall's great pillars, watching the king, when his head turned in my direction. His eyes found mine, and sparkled with what looked like affection. It took me aback: since his coronation I'd had perhaps three brief interactions with the king, none of them remarkable in any way. Surprised by this sliver of royal attention, I went to my knee and held the pose until King Richard released me with a slight, boyish smile and a swivel of his chin. It was a moment of genuine connection I would hold in my mind in the weeks ahead, as I learned of our intertwined fates.

'Quite a mess up there.' Ralph Strode had come up behind me. He grasped my arm. We gazed together into the vaults, the moist flakes of sawdust descending in thin streams, stirred up by work on a platform high above. For years there had been talk of an entire new roof, though for now all was timber and shingle, the ceiling playing a constant game of catch-up against rain and birds, bats and wind.

King Richard left the hall, the accustomed din rising again in his wake. As I turned to walk with Strode I was struck by his appearance. The common serjeant's skin was deeply veined, his eyes rheumy, his skin puffy and pink. He barked a wheezing cough into his sleeve.

'You're the busiest man in London, Ralph. I appreciate the time.'

He shook his head. 'For you I'd renegotiate the date of Easter with the Greeks!'

We strolled along the booths as I told him why I was there. For months I had been tangled up over my lands east of Southwark. A wealthy merchant, building a house on a neighbouring lot, had sued for ownership, claiming that certain acreage fell within the boundaries of his property. Though the case hardly threatened my livelihood, it was requiring more of my time than it deserved, and I could find nothing to use against the man. Strode had just the sort of urban pull to finesse a transfer of jurisdiction from the bishop's court across the river. He was one of the few men in London's upper bureaucracy I could honestly call a friend, and he owed me a stack of favours as high as the north tower. 'The short of it, Ralph, is that I want to get this moved to Westminster, into Common Pleas.'

'You'll need a writ of pone, then,' Strode said.

'There may be some complications.'

He asked about the deeds, security, doc.u.mentation, clarifying several matters. At the end he shook his head dismissively. 'None of this should present a problem for writ of pone. I'll put James Tewburn on it when I get back to the Guildhall.'

I inclined my head. 'You're a big gem, Ralph.'

'Believe me, it will be my most pleasant task of the week, and if I can use it to avoid other entanglements ...' His stride stiffened a bit, a hint of trouble in his eyes. 'Especially this Bethlem mess.'

'Oh?' He was turned away and didn't see my reaction.

'The killing up there,' he went on. 'Quite a foul business.'

'So I understand.'

'Didn't help to have the whole thing played by those student hoodlums the other night. For days I've heard cl.u.s.ters of barristers bragging on the affair: the first moot ever busted up by the serjeants! The mayor's courts at the Guildhall are buzzing with it, then I come out here and the murder and its mooting are the talk of Westminster.'

There did seem to be a certain thickness in the air, several animated conversations nearby clearly occupied with more than the usual legal matter. Michael de la Pole, whom I had last seen at La Neyte, stood in the middle of one of them. The chancellor gave me a slight nod when I caught his eye. 'Has the killer been apprehended?' I asked Strode.

'No, nor the victim's ident.i.ty discovered. No name, no a.s.sociates, no claimant to her body.' His voice lowered to a near-whisper. 'She was last seen alive at La Neyte. Now it's rumoured she was an agent of Valois.'

'A spy? Here in England?' I thought back to that moment with Tugg at Newgate, which was supposedly filled with French spies.

'So it seems.'

'Why do they think she's French?'

He shrugged. 'Her clothing, for one. And those who heard her speak claimed her accent smacked of Provence. Avignon, perhaps.' A word with grim a.s.sociations: the schism of the church, a holy empire divided against itself, and France's ally against the true pope in Rome.

Our circles had brought us through each arcade twice, and we now approached the opened doors to the north porch, looking out on the yard. Strode gazed across the line of tents pitched along the hedges. 'War's coming, John. You can see it in the king's face. All this business with the Scots, the truce nearly at an end.' The royal delegation had recently left for negotiations to extend the peace, though no one expected anything to come of them. 'Imagine a French fleet, an invasion force, pulling its way up the Thames.' He looked over the shapeless mound of his nose and across the s.p.a.ce. 'Ten thousand Frenchmen set on revenging their countrymen starved at Calais, or slaughtered at Crecy. What would such a host do to Westminster, to our children?' He leaned over a bal.u.s.trade, elbows on the stone. 'To have their spies infiltrate London itself? Unthinkable.'

I needed more. 'And the girl?'

Strode shrugged his heavy shoulders. 'At La Neyte she was flitting from room to room, admired but unremarked. She was there a whole day, pretending to be a lady-in-waiting to the Countess of Bethune, one of Gaunt's guests. Bethune and the countess had already left for Kenilworth, you see, so no one was there to discredit her. And her story was una.s.sailable. She stayed behind, she told everyone who asked, in order to procure a particular variety of Flemish cloth desired by the countess. At last, by asking the right questions of the right people, the girl found what she was looking for. She stole it and fled, presumably to hand it over to another spy. No one knows whether she succeeded.' He licked his lips. 'Then she was killed.'

'In the Moorfields.'

'Yes.'

'Who found her body?'

'I don't know.'

'Who examined it, attempted an identification?'

His nostrils flared. 'Tyle.' The coroner of London, Thomas Tyle, a man Strode had long despised. Lazy, incompetent, sloppy in his record-keeping, Tyle was an intimate of the king's chamberlain, and let everyone within hearing know it at every opportunity.

'Strange,' I said into the clamour of starlings angling toward the riverbank. 'A murder in the Moorfields? That's outside the walls. Not Tyle's jurisdiction.' Ralph knew this as well as I did, and as I studied his face I could tell the irregularity had been gnawing at him.

He looked at me. 'Nor Tyle's usual practice, to show up and do his actual job.'

'True.' In cases of unnatural deaths, it was the subcoroner who nearly always performed the inquest. Why, then, had Tyle himself taken over the scene? I posed a final question, trying to keep my tone light. 'And what did our French beauty steal out from under Lancaster's nose?' Katherine Swynford had already told me, but I wanted to test Strode's knowledge.

He gazed through the cloud of starlings, black slashes against the sky. 'A book.'

TEN.

Broad Street, Ward of Broad Street 'A nun and a maud, and here we are together again.'

Millicent looked at her sister, huddled in the darkness. Agnes had stayed in the Cornhull house that morning while Millicent went out to sell the bracelet her sister had found on the body in the Moorfields. The tiny piece had fetched a few shillings on Silver Street, enough to keep them fed for a week or two, though what they would do after that was a mystery. She sighed. 'I was hardly a nun, Agnes.'

'Well, you lived among them out at St Leonard's Bromley. Got their speech, learned to read like a master.'

'Not quite,' said Millicent. 'But I darned their robes, smoothed their wimples.' She stared at the book, wondering at the peculiar motivations of its maker. 'Then Sir Humphrey ap-Roger came along, and they put me out as a concubine.'

'Girl who lives as a nun is a nun, leastwise in my book. Not that this is my book now, by the cross.'

Millicent had just struggled through a second reading of this dark work: a difficult book, filled with words and turns of phrase the Bromley sisters had never taught her. An educated laity is our order's highest aspiration, Millicent, Prioress Isabel had reminded her many times. To know that G.o.d's teachings are well water to the thirstful this is one of the central works of our contemplative life. Millicent had cut her teeth on the devotional texts made available to her by the Bromley sisters, though she had never read anything like this. The verse was b.u.mpy, like her heartbeat, with repeated letters throughout and four hammering thumps to each line. Like a minstrel's romance, sung in the halls of lords.

The bone that he breaketh be baleful of harm, Nor treachery's toll with treason within ...

A woman with womb that woes him to wander For love of his lemman, his life worth a leaf ...

Such lines, as she murmured them to her sister, carried dire threats, each one of them tuned to the fate of an English king. Yet much of the work remained obscure, its lines heavy with symbols she couldn't decipher. Hawks, swords, thistles, and much else.

'So what's it all mean, Mil?'

Millicent thought for a while. 'Twelve prophecies, and I think I've undressed most of them. From the songs the minstrels sing, the plays they put on at Bromley Manor, St Paul's, everywhere.' The sisters knew these stories well, as did all Londoners: lays of olden kings, ballads of Harold and William the Conqueror, the story of the Lionheart, dying in his mother's arms. 'Twelve kings of England, Ag, all dead in the very way the minstrels say they went. Age, battle, disease, a poker in the a.r.s.e.'

'Kings can die a lot of ways, eh?' Agnes shook her head.

'The great question, though, is, what will be the next way?' Millicent found the pa.s.sage on the final pages that most concerned her: twelve lines of verse, speaking with a terrifying force of her own moment.

Agnes looked confused, so Millicent read through several of the prophecies and glossed along the way. 'I hardly know all our kings, Ag, but as for the ones I do know, the book seems to have it about right. And now we have here, in these last lines, the thirteenth prophecy.'