Dark Fire (13 page)

I went into my parlour. Joan had opened the window and the tapestry on the wall showing the story of Joseph and his brothers stirred in the warm breeze. There was new rush matting on the floor,
giving off the harsh tang of the wormwood Joan put on it to discourage fleas.

I remembered I must write to Joseph arranging to meet. I climbed the stairs to my study. As I passed Barak’s room I heard my housekeeper clucking like an old hen about the state of the
blankets. That room, I remembered, had once belonged to my former assistant, Mark. I shook my head in puzzlement at how the wheel of fortune turned.

J
OAN PREPARED
an early supper. It was a fish day so we had trout and afterwards a bowl of strawberries. The good weather that spring had brought them on
early. Barak joined me at table, and I said grace, though I no longer did that when I was alone. ‘For the food the Lord has provided, let us be thankful. Amen.’ Barak closed his eyes
and bowed his head, raising it as soon as I had finished intoning. He tucked happily into his fish, lifting his food to his mouth with his knife in an ill-bred way. I wondered what his religious
views were, if any.

He interrupted my train of thought. ‘I’ll give you those books and papers later,’ he said. ‘By Jesu, they’re strange reading.’

I nodded. ‘And I should consider how to proceed.’ It was time to try and stamp my authority on the matter. ‘Let me get it right. The first person involved in point of time was
the friar, the librarian.’ I ticked names off on my fingers. ‘Then the Gristwoods went to Bealknap and he went to Marchamount. Marchamount told Lady Honor, who told Cromwell. Three of
them, then. We can discount the friar as the moving force behind this.’

‘Why?’

‘Because someone hired two ruthless rogues to kill the Gristwoods. I can’t see Lady Honor or either of the lawyers charging in there with an axe, can you? But any of those three
could have afforded to hire killers, though it would cost much more than a pensioned-off friar could raise. I still want to talk to him – he saw the stuff discovered. I’ll see Bealknap
and Marchamount tomorrow at Lincoln’s Inn; there’s a lunch in hall. For the Duke of Norfolk,’ I added.

He screwed up his face in distaste. ‘That arsehole. How he hates my master.’

‘I know. We can use tomorrow morning to go to the jetty where you saw that ship burned up, and I’ll try to see Joseph then too. We can also go to Augmentations – they’re
so busy these days they keep open on Sundays. I can miss church for once. What about you?’

‘My parish in Cheapside is so full of people coming and going the vicar scarce keeps note of who’s there or not.’

Pleased at the brisk way I had formulated my plan of action, I gave Barak a satirical half-smile to match his own. ‘You don’t feel the need to humble yourself before God then, ask
forgiveness of your sins?’

He raised his eyebrows. ‘I serve the king’s vicar-general and the king is God’s anointed representative on earth. If I am on his business, how can I be doing other than
God’s will?’

‘Do you really believe that?’

He gave his mocking grin. ‘About as much as you do.’

I took some strawberries and passed the bowl to Barak. He spooned half the dish onto his plate and added cream. ‘Then there is Lady Honor,’ I continued.

He nodded. ‘She usually has these sugar banquets of hers on a Tuesday. If you haven’t heard by Monday morning I’ll ask his lordship to give her a nudge.’

I looked at him levelly. ‘Doing what you can do to assist, eh?’

‘Ay.’

‘And is that what you are? My assistant?’

‘Assist and facilitate,’ he replied briskly. ‘That’s what his lordship asked me to do. I know what I’m about. Don’t mind that fussy old arsehole Grey; he
doesn’t like my rough ways. He thinks he knows my master’s business better than my master, but he doesn’t. Sniffling old pen gent.’

I would not be diverted. ‘You started as my watcher.’

He changed the subject. ‘That Wentworth case – there’s more to it than meets the eye, if you ask me. That girl in court, y’know what she reminded me of? John
Lambert’s burning. Remember that?’

I remembered only too well. Lambert was the first Protestant preacher to go too far for the king. Eighteen months earlier he had been tried for the heresy of denying transubstantiation, before
the king himself as head of the Church, judge and inquisitor, dressed in the white robes of theological purity. It had been the first major reversal for reform. ‘That was a cruel
burning,’ I said, looking at him sharply.

‘Were you there?’

‘No. I avoid these spectacles.’

‘My master likes his people to go, show loyalty to the king.’

‘I remember. He made me go to Anne Boleyn’s execution.’ I closed my eyes for a moment against that memory.

‘It was a slow burning, the fire fairly sweated the blood out of him.’

I was relieved to see a look of distaste cross Barak’s face. Burning was a terrible death, and in those days of accusation and counter-accusation it was the one everyone feared. I
shuddered, passing my hand across my brow. It felt red and sore, I had a touch of the sun.

Barak leaned his elbows on the table. ‘The way Lambert walked to the stake with head bowed, refusing to answer the taunts of the crowd, that was what reminded me of the girl. His
demeanour. Later, of course, he was screaming.’

‘You think Elizabeth seemed like a martyr, then?’

Barak nodded. ‘Ay, a martyr. That’s the word.’

‘But for what?’

He shrugged. ‘Who can say? But you’re right to talk to the family; I’ll warrant the answer’s there.’

The idea of Elizabeth’s manner as martyrlike had not occurred to me, but it rang true. I looked again at Barak. Whatever else he was, he was no fool. ‘I’ve sent Simon with a
note asking Joseph to call here tomorrow at twelve.’ I got up. ‘We can go to the jetty first thing, we should start early. Where is it exactly?’

‘Downriver, out beyond Deptford.’

‘And now I should look at these papers of yours. Could you bring them to me?’

‘Ay.’ As he got up he nodded. ‘You’re getting to grips with the matter, I see. Planning everything out. My master said you were like that, didn’t let go once you
were started.’

T
HE SUN WAS BEGINNING
to set as I took Barak’s satchel out into the garden. I had had much work done there these last two years and often sat
outside enjoying its calm and fine scents. Its design was simple; squares of flower beds divided by trellised paths shaded by climbing roses. No knot gardens with complex designs in the form of
puzzles for me; there were puzzles in my work and my garden was a place of quiet order. Once I had thought reform might similarly order the world, but that hope was long gone. More recently I had
hoped that the peace of my garden might be a foretaste of a quiet life away from London, but that too now seemed very far off. I sat on a bench, glad simply to be alone at last, and opened the
satchel.

I sat reading for two hours as the sun sank gradually and the first moths appeared, flickering towards the candles Simon lit in the house. I turned first to the papers Michael Gristwood had
brought from the monastery. There were four or five illustrated manuscripts written by old monastic writers, giving vivid descriptions of the use of Greek Fire. Sometimes they called it Flying
Fire, sometimes the devil’s tears, fire from the dragon’s mouth, Dark Fire: I puzzled over that last name. How could fire be dark? An odd image came into my head of black flames rising
from black coals. It was absurd.

There was a page in Greek torn from the biography of the Byzantine emperor Alexios I who reigned four hundred years ago.

I laid down the paper. What happened to the apparatus? I wondered. Had that been taken from Wolf’s Lane too? If it was metal it would be heavy. Had the killers brought a cart there? I
turned to another account, of a giant Arab fleet sent to invade Constantinople and utterly destroyed by flying fire in
AD
678, fire that burned even on the very surface of the sea. I stared out
over the lawn. Fire that burned downwards, that could burn on water itself? I knew nothing about the mysteries of alchemy, but surely such things were impossible?

I turned next to the only paper in the collection in English. It was written in a round, clumsy hand.

The year after Constantinople fell to the Turks, I remembered.

I put it down. So the friars had hidden the papers, and the barrel, away, realizing the potential for danger and destruction they had in their hands: not knowing that ninety years later King
Henry and Cromwell would come and clear them all out. As I sat there, I had a vision of the fall of Constantinople, that great tragedy of our age; soldiers and officials and citizens fleeing the
doomed city, making for the dock and the boats to Venice to the sound of booming artillery and the roars of the Turks outside.

I picked the paper up again, and sniffed it. It had a faint scent, pleasant and musky. I turned to the remaining papers, the same odour lingered on some of the others. I frowned; the smell was
nothing like incense: surely it had not come from a monastery cellar. I had never smelt anything like it before. I laid the papers down again, then started as a moth flew into my face. The sun was
touching the top of the trees over in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and cows were lowing in the distance. I turned to the books.

These were mostly Latin and Greek works that told stories of Greek Fire. I read old Athenian legends of magic garments that could burst into fire when worn, read Pliny’s description of
pools by the Euphrates that discharged inflammable mud. It was clear the writers were merely repeating stories, with no real idea of how Greek Fire was actually made. There were also a couple of
alchemical works, which discussed the matter in terms of the philosopher’s stone, the precepts of Hermes Trismegistus, and analogies between metals, stars and living things. Like the book I
had taken from Sepultus’s workshop, I found them incomprehensible.

I turned back finally to the old parchment Cromwell had shown me in his room, the picture of the ship spouting Greek Fire, with the top part torn off. I ran my fingers along the torn edge. That
act had cost Michael Gristwood his life.