A Burnable Book: A Novel Part 8

He wouldn't meet my gaze.

'Tell me, Nick.'

He straightened his back, his chin high. 'Nothing more to tell, Gower.'

We stood for a time, Symkok squirming in his discomfort.

'Do some digging, then,' I quietly said. A cart pa.s.sed behind him, a low groan from its wheels. 'I need to know why Tyle took this one. Who told him to do the inquest himself rather than fob it off, like he usually does? And what did he find?'

He swallowed, his lined neck rippling with the effort.

'Be discreet about it, Nick.'

He swallowed again. 'Always am, Gower, at least where you're concerned.'

I left him there, gnawing at his past.

Back at St Mary Overey a letter awaited me in the hall. I took it up from the tray where Will Cooper would leave all my correspondence, expecting a bill from a local merchant, or a report from the bailiff of one of my estates. I was surprised at the letter's weight until I turned it over and saw the heavy seal. The wax bore the impress of Robert Braybrooke, Bishop of London.

Rather unusual, to send a sealed missive across the river when the bishop's messenger could have said a simple word to my servant. After a moment's hesitation I broke the wax. The note was short and to the point, and in his chief secretary's hand. The Lord Bishop of London requested my presence at Fulham Palace this Monday, at the hour of Tierce, upon his return from a visitation up north. The letter left the subject of the appointment unmentioned. London and I had had our moments, though all of that was far in the past, and I wondered what the bishop could possibly want with me. I thought about it for a while, ticking off a mental list of current complexities but coming up with nothing aside from Katherine Swynford's brief mention of Braybrooke at La Neyte, and his distress over the book sought by Chaucer.

Whatever its subject, the bishop's was an invitation I was in no position to decline. In my study I scribbled a reply at the foot of the letter, melted some wax, and left the missive in the tray for Will, who would arrange its delivery for that afternoon. Five days, then I would know more.

TWELVE.

Cutter Lane, Southwark The knife landed in muscle with a wet spit. A second blade quickly followed, nearly touching the first. The carca.s.s swayed, and Gerald Rykener clapped his hands roughly on his tunic. 'Have that, Tom.'

The other apprentice stepped up to the line, a blade pressed between his fingers. His wrist bent, his arm rose, and with a flash of metal the knife was buried in the flank just inches from Gerald's. The second landed a half foot higher on the beef, missing its target. 'd.a.m.n it to queynting h.e.l.l,' he said, then with a scowl handed Gerald a coin.

Eleanor watched her brother pocket it, and for a moment the simple joy of victory on his face turned him back into the sweet boy she remembered. Then Gerald saw her.

'Ah, by St George. Swerving again,' he muttered to his companion, his contempt for her undisguised.

The other apprentice looked over to where she stood by the fence. 'What do you think, Gerald? Your brother a mare or a gelding?'

'A mare with a c.o.c.k?' Gerald taunted. 'A gelding with a queynt?'

'Either way she-he's got enough riders to keep him-her filled with oats 'n' mash till the trumpet sounds, from what I hear.'

'Aye that,' said Gerald, ignoring her as his fellow turned for the barn. Gerald wiped a long crimson smear across his cheek, then from beneath the carca.s.s removed a bucket of blood. He took it to a heated cauldron at the far end of the yard. Gerald was fourteen, yet already moved with a tradesman's confidence that would have been endearing if he hadn't turned so foul. His ap.r.o.n was cut small in the style of the craft. We butchers pride ourselves on leaving our ap.r.o.ns white, he'd explained in those days when he cared. Now it was stained a brownish red, his loose breeches slimed with gore.

When he returned to the fence she saw the latest bruises had faded. His lip, too, had mostly healed. He was close so she went for his neck, the line of faded scar tissue running from his jaw to his nape. He knocked her hand back but she reached for his head and felt a new knot. Size of a peach pit. 'What's that about?'

He ducked away. 'He swings the mallet around, you know, got those teeth on it. It's wood, though, so. But Grimes'd never hit me with the metal one. Not ever.'

'Not yet,' she said. 'And when he does you'll be dead as that beef side hanging behind you.' Why Gerald took his master's part so often she couldn't reckon, though Nathan Grimes had been his effective father for going on three years, and children could develop peculiar loyalties.

He looked at her purse. She handed him the coins she'd come to deliver. 'It's hardly much. A shilling and five. Keep it somewhere, use it only in your most needful moments. Not for candied gingers on the bridge, now.' She half-turned to go, but something in his eyes held her back. 'What is it?' Trying to sound impatient: she needed to be tough with him, tough as he was with her, or he'd never make it to his majority. 'What is it, Gerald?'

He snarled and spat in the filthy straw. 'No matter. Go away, Edgar.'

As her brother returned to his work Eleanor watched him sadly, marvelling at how much the boy had changed. They had been separated since their mother's death, when Gerald was seven, Eleanor thirteen and starting to discover her second life. A man in body, but in soul a man and a woman both, a predicament that made her wardship a domestic h.e.l.l: a wife who tormented her with the hardest household labour, a husband who wouldn't leave her alone once he found out what she was. She had taken to the streets at sixteen. Gerald, though, had seemed to be getting by, floating from guardian to guardian, some good, some bad, yet all carefully regulated by the city, with appearances before the mayor himself once a year. Eleanor managed to see him nearly every month as they grew up. Finally, at his eleventh birthday, the office of the common serjeant arranged for his apprenticeship to a freeman of London and master butcher, and all appeared set.

Then, not six months after his apprenticeship began, the city pa.s.sed the butchery laws, and Gerald's master moved his shop across the river to Southwark to avoid the fines and fees. There not only butchers but guardians operated on their own authority, with little legal oversight from the town, and no common serjeant to take the orphans' part. 'Never heard no law against a butcher moving shop to Southwark,' Grimes had said when Eleanor confronted him. He turned instantly cruel upon the move across the Thames: Gerald was on his own there, surrounded by meat yet starved for bread, beaten regularly and with no recourse. Eleanor had tried to intervene, but the laws of London, it was said, have no house in Southwark.

Soon enough Gerald was turning into one of them, these Southwark meaters, a nasty bunch of Cutter Lane thugs without guild or code, sneaking rotten flesh into the markets and shops across the river. The Worshipful Company of Butchers, London's legitimate craft, had been trying for years to quash the flow of bad flesh into the city to no avail, and now that Gerald had been caught up in their illegal trade he, too, was slipping down the path to a hanging. It often seemed to Eleanor that Gerald's entire self had changed, as if the Holy Ghost had sucked out his soul and the devil had blown in another.

'Best be off,' she said. He shrugged indifferently. From behind her, a whisper of straw. A pig, she thought. Gerald's back was to her as he sc.r.a.ped at a pile of hardened dung. 'May be a stretch before I can get out here again.' She recalled the beadle's questions, the threats, and thought of Agnes. Two sparrows perched on the side of the stall flitted off. Gerald started to turn. 'There's been some trouble on the lane, and I might have to be-' He faced her now. His eyes widened.

Eleanor's neck snapped back, her hood wrenched violently downward by an unseen hand. She was spun around into the face of Nathan Grimes, taking in his ale-breath. 'Trouble on Gropec.u.n.t Lane? For a lovely boy-princess like yourself?'

'You let my brother go, now!' Gerald screamed, backing away. 'You just let him go, Master Grimes!'

Grimes was a stout, boar-like man, with well-muscled arms that flexed as he held her. 'I'll let it go all right.' With a hard push against her head, he shoved Eleanor to the stall floor. She backed up against the boards, then came to her feet, her breath shallow.

Grimes gestured toward Gerald. 'Get inside, boy.' Gerald stayed where he was. Grimes raised a hand. 'Inside, boy.' Gerald looked at Eleanor. She gave him a rea.s.suring nod. He backed away, pushed open the pen gate, and walked reluctantly toward the house. The butcher leaned over Eleanor, toying with Gerald's knives.

'I know what you be, Edgar Rykener,' said Grimes, with a small lift of his chin. 'No place for swervers in a respectable butcher's shop, now. Let your brother learn his craft in peace.'

'Peace?' said Eleanor under her breath; then, more loudly, 'He getting any peace by your hand?'

'Getting fed, isn't he?' Grimes retorted. 'Getting schooled in hogs and calves, learning the way of the blade, got some thatch over his head. More'n you can say for lots of boys his age, in London or not.'

'And getting a mallet to the skull in the bargain.'

Grimes spat in the dirt. 'Boy needs to learn respect he wants to be a freeman like me.'

'You took an oath, Master Grimes,' she seethed. 'In the mayor's presence himself you swore to G.o.d you'd protect my brother, keep him from harm. Now you'd as lief kill him.'

Grimes lifted a cleaver, fingered its edge. 'Never cut up a maudlyn in all my day.' He looked over at the beef carca.s.s. 'Can't imagine there's much trouble to it, though.' He smiled. 'Now get back to London, sweetmeats.'

She edged out of the stall with a final glance at Gerald. He stood in the doorway to the apprentices' shack, his face so much older than it should have looked. Once she was gone Grimes would paint it good. The burden of it all settled on her: a murder, a missing friend, a brother liable to be brained at any moment and clearly troubled by something he wouldn't reveal.

Yet there was one man who might be capable of putting things right for Gerald, Eleanor speculated as she walked up toward the bridge, get him out of all of this. A kind man, from all she'd heard. A man with the authority to remove her brother from his Southwark dungeon and put him with a kinder master in London. As she pa.s.sed back over the bridge she thought about this man, knowing, at least, where to find him; trusting, for she had to, in his kindness.

THIRTEEN.

St Mary Overey, Southwark On the morning after Low Sunday I rose early, awakened by the buzz of the priory bell, cracked and unreplaced since the belfry fire two years before. My appointment with Braybrooke would not be for hours, but I left the house anyway, absorbing the quiet din of these Southwark streets at dawn, already alive with the work that sustained the greater city over the river. Here the trades commingled with none of London's attempt at logic, the shops of haberdashers and carpenters, tanners and tawyers, fishmongers and smiths, coopers and brewers all side by side, spewing smells and sounds and petty rivalries even as small creeks of rubbish spilled out of alleys between them. I stepped into a baker's shop and purchased two sweetbuns for the trip. At the river landing I paid my pennies and hopped on a common wherry, joining a few others westward bound.

I found a seat for the float to Fulham, and as the wherry pa.s.sed St Bride's on the north bank I squinted across the wide span at a group of young men in skiffs. They were tilting, I realized, their target a square of beaten tin suspended from the lampstick of an anch.o.r.ed barge. Four oarsmen per skiff made wide circles around the craft, the lanceman at the bow, loose on his knees; then, a speedy approach, the lance held at the shoulder, the skiff keeping steady over the rises; and finally impact, as the dulled point of the lance struck the tin, the noise carrying over the water. An awkward game, yet several of the young men were quite skilful with their lances, taking the applause of their mates with exaggerated pride.

These, I thought with a shudder, would be the first Englishmen killed were a French invasion force to sail up the Thames from Gravesend and destroy the bridge. How would these boys spend their final moments? Would they turn tail, ditching their skiffs on the bank, fleeing through the streets? Or would they stand and fight, tilting at warships in a futile attempt to save London?

At the quay of Patrisey I changed wherries and thought ahead to my appointment with the bishop. Knowing Braybrooke as I did, I could expect a meeting full of venom and insinuation, of parries and feints. Tread softly, I warned myself.

With a slow turn toward the north bank, we pa.s.sed lines of oak and elm towering over the terraced lawns leading up to the bishop's great house, which commanded an enviable position over the river. Above the dock was a pavilion trimmed in banners of silk, cloth of gold, and sable, displaying Braybrooke's mascles over his personal barge.

As the bank came into view I saw not only Braybrooke's colours, but the Earl of Oxford's as well. The wherry b.u.mped in just up-river from Braybrooke's barge, and as I stepped up the bank I saw Robert de Vere striding across the lower terrace. Normally Oxford moved about with a larger retinue, yet his only companion that day was Sir Stephen Weldon. I bowed as the earl approached. He looked me over, his discomfort apparent as he waved me to my full height.

'Gower,' he finally said.

'Your lordship.' I nodded to Weldon. 'Sir Stephen.'

Weldon returned the nod.

'How is his lordship the bishop?' I asked them.

'Supervising plantings on the upper terrace,' said the earl, forcing a smile. 'Seems there are some questions about the rigor of the vines he's got in from Bordeaux. But he's still determined to pull a decent clairet from our English clay.'

I winced. 'Pretres anglais ont toujours aime le vin.'

'As long as I'm not forced to sample the result,' said Oxford.

Weldon feigned choking, a comic gesture that broke the awkwardness. 'I do miss the wines of Italy,' the knight said, his eyes crinkling with the memories. For years Weldon had served with Sir John Hawkwood before his permanent return to England in the fifth year of Richard's reign. Weldon was taller than Oxford, and thinner, with a studied casualness to his stance. He wore little in the way of livery, a small badge on his right breast the only mark of his station. 'Perhaps England's next war might be fought over France's vine rather than its cities.'

'A welcome suggestion,' I said, choosing to take Weldon's courteous demeanour as sincere. 'For that I'd happily lift a sword.'

With these elevated nothings we parted, and I was left wondering what business the earl could possibly have at Fulham. To my knowledge, all Oxford and London shared was a mutual hatred of John of Gaunt.

I was directed to an upper side terrace, reached after a circuitous route through a network of gravel walks. I found the Bishop of London on his knees, thinning roses. At a discreet distance stood two servants bearing bowls, flagons, and gardening tools for the bishop's use, and, closer, four additional men holding his robes, mitre, and cap: two friars, a canon of some kind, and Fulham's head gardener, the last with his hands crossed tightly in front of him as Braybrooke a.s.saulted his art with the unpractised hand of a knight shearing sheep. The canon, noticing me, cleared his throat. Braybrooke turned.

'Gower.' The bishop was a man of awkward, treeish height; to see him on his knees, his meaty hands scooping dirt from the ground, was something new.

'Your lordship.'

Braybrooke loosened a stone. 'How's Gaunt?'

'I would not know, your lordship,' I said. 'I caught a pa.s.sing glimpse of him the other week at La Neyte, but that is all.'

Another stone, a spray of soil. 'Can't be comfortable for the duke, can it, being a constant object of suspicion?' I listened as the bishop muttered over the royal troubles of the last year, still the talk of the realm. He had been at the council tournament in February, and I learned a new detail about the aftermath of Oxford's plot against Lancaster. If not for the peacemaking interventions of Countess Joan, the bishop claimed, either Gaunt or King Richard would surely have been dead by now. And with the king still young, always gullible, and increasingly unpredictable in his alliances, things could only worsen.

'What about you, Gower?' the bishop said. 'You're content with your own alliances?'

'I'm for the king, your lordship,' I said cautiously. 'From whatever faction he comes, I'm for the king.'

'An easy vow.' He packed dirt into the new hole. 'For a man who takes such stark moral stands in his verse, you're remarkably reluctant to choose sides.'

My jaw tightened.

'The lines are being drawn, Gower. Two popes, two churches some would say two kings.' The bishop looked up, his eyes cold. 'Your friend Geoffrey Chaucer, too, would do well to clarify his allegiances. Not a lover of friars, that one.'

I glanced at the two Dominicans. 'Chaucer is a lover of the good,' I said. 'He loves good friars, as he loves good bishops such as your lordship. Good wine, too, and good lawyers.'

Braybrooke barked a laugh. He clipped and dug for a while, then looked up at me again. 'This book you're looking for has a name.'

I blinked.

'You think I'm a fool, Gower? You make a wide-eyed request of Katherine Swynford, the yawningest mouth in the realm, and you expect her not to gossip?'

'A fair point,' I conceded.

'Liber de Mortibus Regum Anglorum.'

'My lord?'

'Liber de Mortibus Regum Anglorum. That's what this work is called.'

'"The Book of the Deaths of English Kings",' I translated.

'A book of prophecy, written by a certain Lollius during the reign of the Conqueror.'

'That long ago? What relevance could a book three centuries old have in our day?'

'The De Mortibus prophesies the death of every English king since William. The houses of Normandy, Plantagenet, with the circ.u.mstances of each royal death rendered in detail. The time, the place, the means.'

'I've never heard of this Lollius. Are people taking this seriously?'

'The book is being read by Wycliffe's minions, Gower. They gather in conventicles and recite the prophecies one by one. Thirteen kings, thirteen prophecies, thirteen deaths, all foretold and retold as a goad to revolt.'

'I loathe Wycliffe's teachings as much as the next fellow, your lordship. But he never questioned Richard's legitimacy.'

'I suggest you learn a bit about this book before you dismiss it, Gower. One of my friars here has mingled with the Wycliffites during their readings. He's got a bit of the work in his head.' He looked over his other shoulder. 'Brother Thomas, a taste. The death of King William, if you please.'

One of the friars stepped forward with a bow. At a nod from Braybrooke, he spoke the requested lines.

'A b.a.s.t.a.r.d by birth, of Brittany bane, A duke rendered king by Deus decree, With fury so fierce all England will fight, Shall matins and ma.s.ses restore to all men, Then in Mantes to muster his might shall appear.

Unhorsed by his hand this sovereign full hale On pommel full pounded from saddle shall pitch, And goeth to ground to giveth the ghost.

At sovereign of swords in death swoon he will, No more to flee mors, his reign an end make.'

The friar stepped back, a.s.suming his position, still by the tree. Something about the lines sounded familiar.