A Burnable Book (12 page)

Chapter xvi

Gropecunt Lane, Ward of Cheap

E
leanor had slumped herself over the low fence, trying to ignore the soreness in her feet. It was early afternoon, not a jake in sight, though the tedium only sharpened her worry. For hours she had been hanging next to Mary Potts, going over the same ground as her foot traced lines in the dust. Agnes still missing, her brother’s life threatened by a cruel master, that girl’s body never leaving her inner sight.

At the moment her thoughts were all on Gerald, though she couldn’t help commingling her concerns. “Only a wooden mallet, he says. Never hits me with the metal one! You hear that? He’s got to get out of that cutter’s shop, Mary. Grimes’ll brain him sure, or he’ll lose an arm for bad meat. But now I’m afraid to leave Gropecunt Lane in case Agnes comes back, not that there’s much chance of that, plus then the beadle’ll start asking more questions. But if I don’t seek out the common serjeant soon, get Gerald moved back to London—why, he’s dead sure as we stand here, like that girl on the moor!”

“Just
go,
El,” said Mary. “You been twisting your teats about the thing for days now. What’s the worst can happen? Mayor’ll throw you out on Cat Street and you’ll be right back here, doing what you love. I’ll be here the whole time, waiting on Ag.”

Eleanor felt a nudge of hope. “You’ll cover for me with the Dun Bell?”

“If Joan asks, I’ll say you went off with King Richard and Bolingbroke to teach those boys how to keep their young wives happy.”

Eleanor kissed her, grateful for Mary’s practicality. She snuck off through an alley; replaced her dress and bonnet with the breeches, hose, coat, and cap she kept hidden behind a horsestall; manned her hair and face in a trough; and was soon in the crowded precincts surrounding the Guildhall. It was market day, though despite the morning fires the westernmost hulk of the college threw the loud press of Basinghall in a cold shadow that pimpled his arms. Passing the eastern gatehouse Edgar came out between the chapel and the library into the more open expanse of Guildhall yard, where he paused to survey the inner precinct.

The common serjeant might have been anywhere, so Edgar chose a position outside the west doors to the side of the porch, edging near a clutch of women selling hand food. He was used to leaning against posts watching men’s faces for long stretches of time. No different than swyving. He settled in for a wait, studying the trawl of tradesmen and bureaucrats and hucksters moving in and out of the doors and gates.

Edgar had encountered the common serjeant of London once before, at the procedure terminating his wardship upon his majority. An ample man. Reddened cheeks. A massive nose. The man had treated him with a genuine if cursory kindness on that earlier occasion, and Edgar’s hope was that he would be similarly disposed toward Gerald.

Now here he was, coming right toward him. There were three men, deep in conversation, and as they stepped up to the porch Edgar took a few idle steps in their direction, picking up a fragment of their exchange.

“ . . . could not have been clearer,” one of them said, “though the mayor’s lost his patience.”

“All of us have.”

“Don’t have much of a choice, though, do we?”

The shortest one walked through the Guildhall door with a grim nod to the others. Ralph Strode and the first man huddled together, their voices too quiet to make out, then the other man followed his colleague into the great structure. Strode turned about and made his way along the south side of the building, waving off the hucksters thrusting buns and pies at his face. Edgar followed him as he angled for a cluster of lower timber buildings at the far side of the Guildhall.

He quickened his pace. “Master Strode.”

Strode looked down at him but did not slow. “Busy just now.” They passed along the western edge, the scent of roasting chicken in the air from the spits in the side yard.

“Pardon, Master Strode, but there be a matter of some urgency that requires your attention,” said Edgar, trying to sound proper.

“Some urgency,” Strode said, his voice strained. “How many times have I heard those words this week?”

“It concerns my brother, Gerald. He’s but fourteen, sir, and I worry for him.” He stayed at Strode’s heels through a narrow passage between two of the outbuildings. “He was one of your charges, Master Strode, an orphan of the city. Now he’s a butcher’s apprentice and his master beats him, beats him somewhat awful. With a
mallet,
sir. I fear for his life.”

Strode stopped in midstep, his frame swaying like an overfilled cart. Slowly he turned. “Tell me your name,” he said, his robed bulk looming over Edgar in the shadows.

“Rykener. Edgar Rykener, and my brother’s Gerald Rykener, butcher’s apprentice of Southwark.”

“Rykener.” A voice resonant and deep. “Edgar Rykener. And your brother is Gerard, you say?”

“Gerald, sir. Gerald Rykener.”

He waved him along with a heavy sigh. “You’ve found the right functionary to your purpose. Step in here. We’ll have the matter out.”

Edgar followed him into a two-room stone-and-timber building with parchment windows on the outer walls. In the front chamber were three desks; a small hearth, currently cold; and a generous amount of crammed shelving. Two of the three desks, the largest one against the far wall, were occupied by four young clerks, one huddled over each side and all busy scribbling onto the parchments, papers, and ledgers spread before them. Iron-looped oil lamps dangled from chains of varying lengths, like a strange tree bearing fruits of smoky light.

The clerks sat up at the common serjeant’s entrance. Strode summoned one of them with a raised hand and a snap. “Tewburn.”

Edgar started and blushed, recognizing the clerk immediately. James Tewburn was one of her more frequent mares. Liked to take it as a woman, mouth and arse alike. But he was always tender, always paid well. He didn’t recognize Edgar in mannish garb. Not yet.

“Mark what this young fellow says, James,” Strode ordered the clerk, without noticing Edgar’s discomfort. “Take his name, the location of his brother’s shop in Southwark, the name of his master—all the pertinent details. Write them up as an appeal to Wykeham and keep at it until the matter is resolved.”

“Yes, Master Strode,” said Tewburn, looking right at Edgar, though still without a trace of recognition.

Strode flashed an easy smile. “Pardon the lawyerly cant, Edgar. I’ve explained to Tewburn that we must make an appeal to the bishop of Winchester, William Wykeham, in order to transfer wardship of your brother into the City of London. Southwark is out of my jurisdiction. But I know Wykeham well. I can’t imagine he’ll have a problem with our request.”

Edgar nodded, overwhelmed by the man’s generosity. “I—I don’t properly know what to say, Master Strode, nor how to thank you.” He could think of some improper ways, though the common serjeant didn’t seem the sort.

He waved a hand. “Keeping our city’s wards free from harm is my greatest duty. I do it happily. Just confer with Tewburn here, and he’ll have it settled.” He disappeared into the inner chamber.

Tewburn led him over to his desk, where Edgar stood as the clerk shuffled through a mess. The man was younger than he looked, with shoulders already sloped and a discernible hump midway up his back. His eyes, small and round like little black beads over his thin whiskers, took Edgar in with a bureaucrat’s scrutiny.

“Your brother is apprenticed to whom?” he asked, his swollen knuckles poised above a ledger.

“Nathan Grimes, master butcher.”

“Of?”

“Cutter Lane in Southwark.”

“Your brother is to be a butcher, then?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And he’s in what year of his apprenticeship?”

“His third, sir.”

“Age?”

“Fourteen, sir.”

“I’ll take up your brother’s wardship as quickly as I can,” said Tewburn, a ready warmth in his voice as he discerned the depth of Edgar’s concern. “Come round in a week or so.” Still no flash of recognition, and Edgar left Guildhall yard with a tentative hope that Tewburn would truly help his brother.

Later Eleanor crossed the bridge to risk another visit to Grimes’s yard, where she found Gerald alone, shoveling dung. His arms, bare and glistening with sweat, showed a patchwork of fresh bruises, and a gash on his brow had recently scabbed over. His eyes when he looked at her were empty, his shoulders slumped.

After she greeted him he wiped a forearm across his brow. “Might be time after all.”

“Time for what?”

His shifted on his feet. “To find me another station. Butcher’s shop back in London.”

She slapped him, hard. “So
now
it’s time, is it, when I been saying the like for two years?”

Gerald shrugged, not defensively but with a sort of sullen fear, the coldness gone from his eyes. “Grimes got himself in some deep stick, Edgar.
Real
deep.” He looked over his shoulder at the butcher’s streetfront office, separated from the slaughterhouse by a series of narrow pens, each containing a few animals just shy of the knife. “You got to get me out of this, and right soon.”

“What kind of stick, Gerald?” she said, not wanting to hear the answer.

“This priest, he shows up time to time. Been four, five times now, to meet with Grimes. They pray and get to talking about another Rising. Grimes was on the bridge, you know, with Wat Tyler. He’s still got plate he took from the Savoy before they torched the place.”

“But that’s wood talk, Gerald,” she said, wanting to believe it.

“They say Wat Tyler should’ve quartered King Richard when he had the chance. Now it’s like to be
their
job. They’re butchers, after all, quick with a knife. Grimes keeps mumbling about his fate, how he’s been chosen for it by God. That’s what the priest told him, so he says when he’s in his ales. Butchers, biding by a bishop’s bank, then springing out to kill the king.”

Eleanor took this in with a mix of contempt and fear. On the one hand, the notion of these Southwark butchers plotting rebellion was ludicrous on its face. Yet when it came to treason the king’s men wouldn’t deal in niceties. If a butcher was conspiring on the death of the king, they’d take his apprentices along with him and happily hang them all. “Grimes is a lunatic, Gerald,” she said, trying to sound convincing. “Man doesn’t have the brains to start a revolt of the mutton against the cows.”

“Still,” he said, “I want out of Cutter Lane, Eleanor. Get me back to London, yeah?”

She looked at his face, set with genuine fear. Gerald called her by her she-name only when he really wanted something. “It may be a stretch of time before I can get it done, Gerald.”

“But soon, Eleanor,” Gerald said. He hefted his shovel. “Soon, yeah?”

Eleanor swallowed, the fear for Gerald eating at her as it never had. “Soon as I can, Gerald. Then you’ll be free.”

Chapter xvii

Colbrokes Quay on the Thames, Tower Ward

T
he Ides of April, and the river’s surface churned beneath a pale sun as I walked the last length of the wharf toward the customhouse, a hard knot in my chest. The book was out of Swynford’s hands, God knew where it was, and Chaucer had no business with it. Seditious, Braybrooke had called it. A traitor’s book. The sensible part of me wanted to warn Chaucer off before the whole thing got us both strung up at Tyburn.

Yet my motives were hardly pure. From everything I had learned the
De Mortibus Regum Anglorum
could become the single greatest piece of information I would ever acquire. To possess this book of prophecies and learn the identity of the king’s supposed assassin? The manuscript would open doors I had been working to unlatch for years: to the Privy Council, to the lord chancellor, to the court’s uppermost magnates. It was clear that Chaucer had been less than honest with me about this book—and I had little enthusiasm left to put it in his fumbling hands.

The door to the customhouse stood open, though no one was inside. Around the near quay a crowd had gathered beneath the highest crane on London’s waterfront. The Goose, the machine was called, its charge to raise with pulley, crank, and the sweat of ten men the most massive arrivals at the city’s port: great slabs of Kentish stone, casks of iron shot, the occasional mast. Chaucer stood there waving his arms up at the crane. From its hook, over the wide deck of a merchant barge, was suspended a large bale of cloth, the subject of a dispute. I went inside to wait.

Surveying the office, I marveled that the crown collected any customs money at all. I’d long been amazed at the administrative burden Chaucer had taken on with this post. Virtually no surface was free of the slips that marked every collection of fee in the port going back years. There were thousands of them, spilling out of drawers and crates, papering the seats of stools, leaving a single narrow path across the floor.
The countless cockets crowding my craw,
Chaucer once put it. The line hadn’t made it into his verse.

As I looked across the littered office of the wool custom, it occurred to me how closely this documentary rat’s nest resembled the disordered sprawl of Chaucer’s poetry. Stories of mundane dealings between men, accounts of every imaginable human exchange, recorded on these slips of skin just as they filled his poems with the endless flow of his imagination.

On the far end of the desk sat the quire I had sent over a few days before. It was our private game, the difficult glue of our friendship. Months could go by between our poetical swaps, yet then we’d sit right down, berating each other for a tenuous metaphor, an ill-chosen trope, a lazy rhyme. That morning Chaucer was to critique some of my elegiacs, fragments of a long Latin work I had been composing since before the Rising and still had not completed. I expected to leave the customhouse with some new writing of his.

Nothing, I felt confident, would divert us from this ritual we had both come to cherish. Not even murder. Not even treason.

“John, you’re here!” Chaucer stepped into the customhouse, his eyes going to the bag at my side. He gave a few instructions to a waiting clerk, signed a bill of some kind, and sent the man back to the wharf. “Let me dig out my little book.”

The air thickened immediately. He wanted to know. But our practice was always to begin with the poetry. He dug through the mess on his desk and emerged with his “little book,” as he called it: the familiar pigskin bifold in which he would keep only those quires of parchment currently in use. It was Chaucer’s custom, once he had filled an existing quire with his writing, to remove it and slip a fresh one within the covers. So familiar was his old, faded bifold that it took my poor eyes a moment to see he had replaced it with a new one.

“Lovely, isn’t it?” he said, showing off the elaborate tooling and the shiny leathern cover, dyed a striking red. “It’s goat. From Africa, swears a leatherworker I know in Florence. He does great work for the Bardis.” He opened it and took out two loose quires wedged between the fixed pages. “These verses are a small taste of a larger compilation I’ve been tossing around. The idea is a pilgrimage, a—well, the frame is unimportant. Two tales here, each to be preceded by a prologue. One is earnest, the other’s all game, and next time I’ll expect a devastating
sed contra
to both.”

I tucked the parchment quires into my bag while Chaucer started humming distractedly and knuckling his desk. I waited.

“Have you read them, Geoff?”

He frowned.

“My elegiacs, on the virtues and vices?” I felt almost childlike, waiting for his attention.

A reassuring smile. “Of course, John. Pardon my distraction.” He sorted through the loose sheets on his desk, found my own booklet of verse. “Here we are. Let’s just see . . .” He scanned his notes in the margins, his lower lip tightening in displeasure. “Rather stark, wouldn’t you say?”

“The lines weren’t written to be light, Geoff. Not like these fabliaux.”

“As you’ll soon learn.” He gestured at my bag, and the work he had given me. “Honestly, though, they could use some leavening.” He took on a preacher’s voice, gazing at me over the folios as he spoke my Latin lines. “ ‘
The schism of our church has cursed us with two popes, one a schismatic and the other legitimate.
’ And the next couplet: ‘
France worships the schismatic and holds him in awe, but England is a defender of the true faith.
’ ” He set the booklet down, a wry challenge in his gaze.

“Should I be amused or offended by your tone?” I asked him. “The church
is
divided: we’re allied with Rome, France with Avignon.”

He shook his head. “Take these next lines, on bishops. Listen to yourself, John.” He went on in my Latin.

“As I seek for followers of Christ among the prelates

I find that none of the rule survives that was once in force.

Christ was poor, but they are overloaded with gold.

He was a peacemaker, but they are warmongers.”

His voice had taken on a singsong cadence, rising before the caesura, then falling toward the end of each line, as if my elegiacs were some child’s rhyme.

“Christ was generous, but they are tight as a closed purse.

He was occupied by labor, they have an excess of leisure.

Christ was virginal; they are like maudlyns.”

He stopped. “I won’t go on—nor, I think, should you.”

I felt my fists clench, and my vision starred. “You’re parroting my lines, as if their faults chirp for themselves. I thought you approved of taking the clergy to task.”

Chaucer squinted down at the quire, wetting a quill. “Perhaps if you lightened up a bit, added a dash of humor to your biting satire?” He dipped, blotted, scratched. “We’ve talked about this before. In your poetry, everyone is either good or bad. There’s no room for moral ambivalence, no accounting for the complexity of character that renders us the fallen humans we are. It’s as if you are firing arrows blindly at the entire world.”

“Are you saying the lines aren’t true to their subject?”

He sighed, then turned to me. “Much worse, John. They are not true to
you
.” I blinked. He leaned forward, his hand clutching his crowded desk. “You’re a dazzling Latinist, John, and your elegiacs could be taught as paradigms of the form. But why can’t you take some
risks
in your work? Your verses always preach the upright line while you spend your own life scurrying through the shadows, ratting up useful bits of information you turn to your own advantage. Do you write this way because you see yourself as some white-clad incorruptible, standing on a high place upheld by excellent moral foundations? I hardly think so. Do you pen lines like these to obfuscate, to keep us all looking away from what you do? Because no one who writes like this could be as devious as John Gower,
mon ami
. Whatever your reason, your making doesn’t come from your heart, from that place that makes you
you
. It doesn’t ring true. It never has.”

I could say nothing. He looked at me for a long moment, a mix of puzzlement and affection in his eyes—and, as I think back on it now, a shadow of pity. “You are a stubborn man, John, and the stubbornest poet I know.” He nudged me back my booklet and turned to his desk, straightening a small corner of the untidy surface. “Keep writing like this and you’re bound for oblivion.”

Though his responses to my poetic making could often be harsh, Chaucer had never spoken to me like this. I sat there, goaded into silence by this cold assessment of my work, feeling something between long regret and immediate fury. Then one of Chaucer’s clerks put his head in the door, asking several questions about the transaction down at the quay.

When the clerk was gone I plunged straight in, my voice tight with anger. “The book you’re looking for is a work of prophecy. You didn’t think to tell me this?”

“Prophecy,” said Chaucer, his bright eyes unreadable. “What sort of prophecy?”

“Braybrooke claims the book is treasonous.”

He bent his neck and looked at the rafters. “ ‘Treason’ is a word tossed around like pigshit these days. Though considering the source I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. For the bishop of London, thought itself is treason. Pose a few curious questions about the sacrament, get a hanging for your trouble.”

“Don’t cling to Wycliffe, Geoff,” I warned him. “Gaunt adored the man for some reason, but he was a heretic, and a dissident. His teachings have been roundly condemned.”

“God help us. And now Braybrooke is convinced this book is heretical? From everything I have heard it’s just a light satire. A well-crafted look into England’s royal past, with a peculiar twist here and there.”

I shook my head. “Believe me, Geoff, this is not a book you want to be associated with. There’s already been loads of trouble about it: at court, at the inns, with the bishops—foul circumstances that surround it on every side. Even a young woman’s death.”

“
What?
”

“Murder, Geoffrey.” I told him what Swynford and Strode had told me, and reminded him of the disrupted pageant at the Temple Hall. I said nothing about the business with Symkok, keeping that bit of information to myself.

His hand went to his mouth. It trembled there, then went back to his side. “Who was the young woman?”

“An agent of the French crown, by all appearances.” He was still. “So you see, it’s not Katherine Swynford who is responsible for the disappearance of the book. This is much bigger than her.”

He stared at me. Were those tears welling in the corners of his eyes? “But
why,
John? Why would anyone kill a young woman over a book?”

“The work concerns the deaths of kings,” I said, pushing on. “Of
English
kings.”

He blinked. Yes, tears. One of them escaped, tracking down his left cheek.

“By statute of Parliament it’s treasonous to compass or even
imagine
the death of the king,” I went on. “Yet this work—and I’ve heard parts of it, with my own ears, from Braybrooke’s friars—this work prophesies the deaths of England’s last twelve sovereigns, as well as—”

“Ha!” He gave a short, frantic bark of a laugh. “How is it that a work can prophesy deaths that have already occurred?”

“I asked Braybrooke the same question. According to the bishop, it was written many years ago.”

“Yet again, how—”

“Its prophecies reflect the chronicles accurately. Consider the prophecy on the death of the second Edward.” I repeated the memorable lines I had heard from Braybrooke’s friar.

“In Gloucester will he goeth, to be gutted by goodmen

With rod straight of iron, in arsebone to run.

With pallet of pullet, his breath out to press,

And sovereign unsound for Sodom be sundered.”

As I spoke the lines Chaucer stood and walked to the opened door, where he leaned on the sill, his shoulders rising and falling to the shouts on the embankment, the clap of boards from an unloading barge.

I gazed at his back. “I haven’t told you the worst. The thirteenth prophecy foretells the death of King Richard.”

A dismissive cluck. “No no no, that’s wrong, Richard does not—” He froze, his eyes widening as he turned to me. His face paled, going the color of sunbleached bone. I approached him and took his hand, the earlier cruelty forgotten for the moment. “Geoffrey, what is it?”

“It cannot be,” he said, his voice just above a whisper, the tears giving way to something I took then as fear. “This explains—but it simply cannot be.”

“You are making no sense, Geoff.”

“But of course. Of
course
!” Tears streamed down his face, his entire frame shaking with the strangest abandon.

Baffling. “Why are you laughing? These are grave matters.” And what are you not telling me?

Chaucer calmed himself, placing a hand on my shoulder as he wiped the other across his eyes. “The book, John,” he said. “Get me the book, and all shall be well.”

“This is blind idiocy, Geoff. The bishop of London himself says it: this is a burnable book, a work of high treason certain to destroy any man who holds it.”

“Get me the book. At any cost.”

“You’re acting like a little boy now. Do you want to see your reputation ruined over all this?”

“
Reputation,
” he said, as if the word were a rotten river oyster. “My
reputation,
you say?” Suddenly back from wherever he had been, Chaucer leaned into me, his face a red mask of cruel intention, his neck a foreign bulge of tendons and veins. “You
will
find this book for me, O Moral Gower. I know it, and you know it. In a city where everyone owes John Gower, Esquire, a favor, Geoffrey Chaucer may be the only soul to whom he owes one himself. Quite a large one, too. And in a city in which John Gower, Esquire, has information on nearly every man of importance, it may be useful to call to mind the small matter of your son’s count—”