A Burnable Book (24 page)

Chapter xxxiii

Ditch Street, near Aldgate

T
he stews of Southwark be watched.” Eleanor turned from the slitted window, looking down on what had to be the narrowest, filthiest alley in all London. In the bare room behind her Millicent and Agnes sat huddled beneath a blanket on an old furze pallet, the rough gorse spines crackling with their every move. It had been a chill afternoon, and for a fourth day the three women had remained inside, waiting for a constable’s pounding at the door. One of Bess Waller’s girls had been bringing food and drink to the room, which had seen its last consistent use two years before as a comfort station of sorts for travelers from Colchester on the Mile End Road. No proper beds, just a stack of old linens for warmth. Though the new ordinances had forced closure of this small venture in the flesh, Bess Waller still leased the filthy tenement on and off as a way of maintaining a foothold in this part of the city.

“Gropecunt Lane’s being watched,” Eleanor continued. “The parvis is being watched. Same with Paternoster Row and St. Paul’s. The eyes of all London are looking about for three maudlyns and a poisonous book.”

“So it is,” said Millicent. “And we’ve nearly lost our chance with the one man who has interest in its purchase—thanks to you, Eleanor Rykener.”

They glared at each other. Eleanor didn’t trust Millicent Fonteyn the width of a hen’s beak, yet here she was, imprisoned in this cursed hole with the uppy trull, and seeing no way out. Unlike Eleanor and Agnes, who’d been living on so little for years, Millicent had plummeted from a condition of genuine wealth and comfort to this dire state. There was a wild, threatened desperation in the woman, like some caged bear on the bankside, baited with a dog, and yet she acted sullen and secretive, casting furtive glances at the book and the stair. Nor did she seem to have any concern for Agnes, who had brought her the book in the first place, put it right in her hands. She treated her sister like a servingwoman, as Eleanor saw it, giving her little commands as if she were some lady at court.

“Selling this book isn’t like peddling meat-pies on the bridge,” Eleanor said. “Why, I seen a man whipped in the street for selling bad herring. Constables catch us at
this
? We’ll be lucky if they throw us in the Tun for a month.”

“We can’t hold it against Pinchbeak that he was away on king’s business when we went to Scroope’s Inn,” Millicent disagreed, rubbing her hands together. “Pinchbeak has wealth beyond our reckoning, ladies, and I for one wish to give him opportunity to lavish it on us.” The two marks were still nearly intact, and Millicent’s hope, Eleanor knew, was to multiply the sum twentyfold or more.

Eleanor shook her head, determined to resist Millicent’s lust for riches. “If Pinchbeak had as much interest in this book as yourself, wouldn’t he have had something more waiting for you when you went to Scroope’s? Besides, you think it’s chance that Gropecunt Lane got broken up so soon after you met him at the parvis?”

“Oh, so you think it’s my doing now, is that it? Listen to the little thief, Ag, just listen to her!” Millicent taunted.

“Oh,
I’m
the thief, is that it, then?” Eleanor’s hands balled hotly into fists. “You two been striding about London these weeks, peddling some other man’s book, and Eleanor Rykener’s the thief, is it?”

Eleanor was now inches from Millicent’s nose. Millicent pushed her roughly, then stepped in, ready to strike. Agnes sprang up. She wedged herself between them, a hand on each chest.

“Shut it, you trulls,” said Agnes. “You want the ward-watch on us?” She gestured to the window. London parishes were small, everyone knew everyone’s business, and it would not do to have theirs known by their temporary neighbors. “If we’re not together on this, all shall be lost.”

Eleanor turned away, her eyes screwed shut. Millicent’s loud breaths slowed.

“Now,” said Agnes, “let’s talk it out. Mil, clamp it for a half bell and let Eleanor speak her thing. It’s the least the girl deserves after what we put her through.”

Millicent shrugged.

“Eleanor, say what you want to say,” said Agnes.

Eleanor calmed herself and spoke. “There are men we can trust in the city, at the Guildhall. The common serjeant, say. He’s helping Gerald, and I don’t doubt he’d help us with this matter of the book.” She thought of Ralph Strode, wondering if he had learned of Tewburn’s death. “We can take it to him. Lay out the whole matter as it’s pulled us in.”

“Turn ourselves in, then?” said Millicent incredulously. “Hand the book over, and our bodies with it?”

Millicent’s rebuttal began another round of argument that stilled with a sudden noise from the alley.

“Jonah’s
cock
it be a hellish walk, and me joints faring poorly.”

A familiar voice, the suck of shoes in mud. The three of them froze, then scrambled about for weapons.

“Bear up, Joannie, bear up,” another voice replied. Equally familiar; more reassuring.

Eleanor walked to the door and opened it a crack. Bess Waller, and behind her trudged Joan Rugg, panting heavily, her great dress half-soaked with her exertion. She stopped when she saw Millicent.

“Ah Lord, Bess, you didn’t”—she paused to catch her breath, pushing her hands against her lower back—“didn’t tell me to expect her ladyship’d be about.” Once inside, she looked around in the candlelight, then chose a stool against the inner wall. “What finds a grand lady like Millicent Fonteyn dallying with two common women, albeit one her sister?”

“No whore be commoner than yourself, Joan Rugg,” said Millicent.

“Won’t give you a
sed
contra
to that, my dear.” Here she looked at Bess. “I’d suppose between the two of us we’ve sold half the queynt of London over the years, hey, Bessie?” She shifted her bulk on the stool, allowing a slow fart to escape her mounded form.

Eleanor wrinkled her nose.

“There’s no body fouler than your own, Joan Rugg,” said Bess.

“Nor no mouth shaped so like a privy,” Eleanor murmured.

Joan showed her suburban rival a charming smile and farted again. “A verse for you, my dear:

“We swyve with pride in Londontown,

    
Those Sou’ark men be thine;

For city pricks be long and thick

    
Yet Sou’ark’s thin as twine.

“My invention, I’ll have you know,” she said with considerable pride. “There be other lines too, if you fancy a hearing on ’em. Now,” she said, turning to her basket, “how about some supper?”

As Joan Rugg dug out a quantity of bread, cheese, and dried meats, she told the others of the dark events on Gropecunt Lane over the last week. Eleanor listened carefully, as Joan’s story explained a lot. A raid, Joan said, the street broken up, every one of her girls hauled in for questioning—though not by the constables or the beadle’s men.

“It weren’t king’s or mayor’s men, I’ll be bound,” Joan said, lipping a stale crust. “Maybe Lancaster’s, maybe Oxford’s or Warwick’s for all I know. Four men I never seen before. They hauled us up to Cripplegate jail, cleared out a room for themselves to assay us one by one. Wore no badges, nor said a word about their affinity or allegiance. Kept us for three days they did, all packed in a cell like a barrel of Bristol herring.”

Eleanor recalled the broken lanterns on Gropecunt Lane, the unraked piles of dung.

“Then, the very day we’re back at swyving,” Joan continued, “the constables find a body down Pancras. A clerk of the Guildhall, murdered like that poor thing in the Moorfields.” She looked at Eleanor, her voice lowering. “That’s when I knew, girls. When I seen the coroner down in the churchyard, a crowd of the beadle’s men around him—and then the alderman himself shows up.”

“Maryns?” Eleanor asked in surprise.

“Grocer and alderman, the very one,” Joan said with a sage nod. “ ‘Now, what,’ I asks myself, ‘has the alderman of Cheap Ward got to do with it all? Where did my Agnes get herself to, and what about that Eleanor Rykener? And who killed that girl, and that Guildhall clerk? A chain of strange happenings, Joan Rugg. Must be more to the matter than it appears.’ ” She raised her chin, proud of her deductive skills. “That’s when I decided it might be well on time to pay a visit to Dame Bess Waller here. Figure we queen bees need to consort when numbers of us start disappearing and folks start getting themselves killed. Parliament of whores is what we need. So I step across the river, find me in Rose Alley for the first time in, oh, must be ten year. And there she is, the cheeky little virgin: Bess Waller, in the incarnate flesh of her, and St. Cath as well, fresh as the dew on the fleece!” It was at the Pricking Bishop that Joan learned the same company of dark-cloaked men had also paid a midnight visit to the Southwark stews.

“But the Guildhall usually keeps its hands off your lot,” Bess observed. “So the question is, what’s that clerk’s killing got to do with all this trouble for us? What’s the damned connection?”

Eleanor took a deep breath. “I am.”

They all turned to her. She told them about her first visit to the Guildhall, how Strode had put her with Tewburn, who promised to get Gerald moved back to London. Then, during his subsequent visits, the intransigence of the Southwark authorities, and Tewburn’s troubles with the butchers. “Tewburn was set to meet with the Guildable justices the very day he was killed. And Gerald thinks Grimes and his boys are up to something. They want the Rising to start again, and this time to kill the king. You should hear the way Gerald went on about it. Butchers, biding by a bishop’s bank, then springing out with their knives.”

Millicent’s head whipped around, her eyes wide. She looked about to speak when Joan intervened.

“That explains the little lurker on Gropecunt Lane, then,” she said.

“What lurker?” asked Maud.

“This one’s brother,” said Joan, nodding at Eleanor. “Didn’t recognize him at first. He shows up that first day back, mean as you could like. Asks about for Edgar the swerver. ‘The swerver,’ he calls our Eleanor, and his own brother! I told him she hasn’t been about, he’ll have to come back he wants some of that weird queynt. Guess that wasn’t what he was after, though by the—”

“Hold it!” said Millicent, springing up and coming to Eleanor’s side. “What did Gerald say?”

“Said that Grimes and his boys—”

“Not that. The part about the bishop’s bank.”

“Just what I said,” said Eleanor, taken aback by Millicent’s intensity. “Buncha butchers, biding by a bishop’s bank, springing forth with knives.”

Millicent looked sharply at Agnes. “That’s it, then.”

“Sounds like,” Agnes agreed.

“What are you on about now?” Bess demanded.

Millicent went to the low shelf by the door where she had placed the manuscript. Tearing off the cloth, she paged quickly to the final folio and read.

“By bank of a bishop shall butchers abide,

To nest, by God’s name, with knives in hand,

Then springen in service at spiritus sung.”

She looked at Eleanor, whose eyes widened with the realization.

Agnes said, “Seems what your brother’s on about is bigger than a lot of talk, Ellie. What do you want to do?”

Eleanor looked at Joan Rugg. “Did Gerald say where to find him?”

She gave a broad shrug. “In the Shambles, he tells me. Didn’t think much of it at the time. Why would one of my mauds go looking for a little jake like that in the Shambles, of all places? But he says you’ll know where to find him if you want him. He’ll be there on Saturday morning. Says he can get off of Cutter Lane and over the bridge for a while. Says you’ll know the spot.”

She did, and Saturday was the day after tomorrow—though would it be safe? She moved again to the doorway, the fear lapping at her. She peered out at the gathering night. “There’s no safe place now, not for any of us been privy to the matter. And I keep seeing Tewburn’s eyes pecked out, and that man on Gropecunt Lane.”

“What man’s that?” Joan asked.

“The man she saw near St. Pancras, the night she found Tewburn,” said Millicent.

“A hook-shaped scar on his chin,” said Eleanor, repeating the description she’d given the others. “Name is Sir Stephen.” Millicent had sworn she’d seen such a chin before, though she couldn’t place the man, or so she had claimed.

“Best to lay low,” said Bess Waller, “give it another week or two, and this whole thing’s like to pass by. Forget about the book. Look to yourselves.”

It was Agnes who saw the great moral flaw in their talk. “Wait, now,” she said. Eleanor watched the beautiful girl as she stepped to the middle of the room, her face aglow with her sincerity. “We’re all thinking about profit, about coin, about Lady Meed and what she’ll do for us if we sell the book to the right man,” said Agnes. “Thinking on our own lives, as if our bodies be the only bodies worth keeping from the grave. Yet here we sit with a book and a cloth speaking the murder of our very king two weeks hence, and what are we
not
thinking about?”

Eleanor nodded slowly, ashamed of herself but with a surge of love and admiration for her friend. “About King Richard.”

“And our having the means in hand to save him!” said Agnes.

Millicent snorted. “It’s not our lot to save his neck. This whole matter is far above our heads, and has been from the beginning. With the book we can buy our lives back, and wealth for ourselves.
That
should be our aim, and no other. Let someone else look to the king’s sorry life.”

“That’s not right, Mil,” said Agnes, shaking her beautiful head. “Just not right.”

“You’d throw away our one chance at new fortune?” Millicent demanded. “To what purpose, Agnes?”

Agnes tossed her head, her loose hair a noble bonnet of gold. “To save our king.”

Joan Rugg threw back her head, cackling incautiously. “Who’d have thought it?” The bawd smoothed her dress over her generous thighs, her chins aglow in the lamplight: a bullfrog’s throat on a moonlit pond. “The very king of England, by the cross, and his life in the hands of five whores!”