The Invention of Fire (10 page)

F
ROM THE GREAT DOORS
the massive hall of Westminster Palace stretched languidly to the east, with partitions of varying heights separating the courts: Chancery, the Exchequer, King’s Bench. England had a leaking hulk for a ship of state, defeating the efforts of the palace’s small army of servants to maintain and improve its fabric. Despite the hall’s condition one could tell at a glance that the opening of that year’s Parliament was nearly upon us. Three glazers worked at a few broken windows overhead, limners touched up wall paintings here and there, and a team of masons troweled mortar over gaps and holes in the stone.

The eve of Michaelmas found me in Westminster before the chambers of Michael de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk and the lord chancellor. As Strode had told me at the St. Bart’s churchyard on that first morning, the chancellor was resisting all inquiries from the Guildhall concerning the murders, claiming they were no business of his or of his office. Yet the use of guns made the killings undeniably the business of the crown, a point I intended to press regardless of the chancellor’s reluctance.

Edmund Rune, the earl’s secretary and chief steward of his sprawling household, stood within the low passage leading to the chancellor’s chambers, expecting me. Rune was a new addition to Michael de la Pole’s
familia,
his predecessor Edward More having died earlier that
year. Where More’s reliable and steady manner had mirrored the best qualities of the earl himself, Rune was known as a gossip and a backbiter. The chancellor, it was widely agreed, could have chosen better.

Rune had a protective air about him that morning, his eyes hanging open over a brown beard, his large frame angled toward me as I approached. “Go gently with him, Gower. He’s feeling it from all sides these days. None of your coiney cant.”

“A peculiar request,” I said, and an unnecessary one; I felt nothing but respect and admiration for Michael de la Pole, who had always treated me fairly. Yet for other, more powerful men, old King Edward’s most trusted counselor had lately become an object of passionate resentment, even outright contempt, despite the man’s long service to the crown. The young king’s capricious favors had placed the earl in a precarious position with respect to several of the lords, who would be assembling in Westminster soon for Parliament.

“Surely these rumors of the earl’s impeachment are false, Rune,” I said. “Lordly gossip, nothing more.”

My tone had been light, meant to reassure. The look Rune gave me beneath his brown curls suggested any levity would be out of place. “The coming weeks will be crucial for his lordship. We are doing everything we can to hold off the spite from the Commons and the Lords alike, but I fear we may be too late. All rides on the king.”

He led me down the passage to the chancellor’s chambers, a set of rooms tucked within the southeastern sprawl of the palace, not far from the Painted Chamber. The chancellor sat not at his study desk but in his receiving room, a low-ceilinged and intimate space long regarded as the hidden heart of Westminster, though its walls were all Yorkshire, washed brightly with rural scenes inspired by the streets and saints of the earl’s native shire.

An old man already, Michael de la Pole seemed to have aged several years since I last saw him a few months before. Eye pockets smudged with fatigue, a neck carelessly shaved, cheeks bowed in above a jaw that had lost its confident jut and now trembled with a creeping palsy that had been coming on over the last two years. Not a broken man,
not yet, though I believe he saw his defeat before him, drawn more sharply with each passing day.

“I trust your lordship is well?” I said, feigning ignorance of his distress.

“The wolves are gathering round, Gower,” he said brusquely, waving at me to be seated. “You know it as well as I do. So let’s slice through the
politique
.”

“My lord?”

His look hardened. “What do you want, Gower?”

The abruptness of the question startled me. My voice betrayed it. “You—your lordship may have heard of an incident in the city,” I said, with an unfamiliar stammer. “A rather grim discovery.”

“In the sewers,” said the earl.

“Yes, my lord. Sixteen men, murdered, tossed in the ditch.”

“Brembre may have said something about it, yes.”

“You’ve spoken directly to the mayor, then?”

“Just once,” he said flatly.

“Did he ask for your assistance?”

“He did, at first, and as I told him, London deaths are London’s concern, not Westminster’s. I have enough to do keeping the lords at bay this season without meddling in the business of gongfarmers.”

“I understand, my lord,” I said, recalling Strode’s recollection of the mayor’s exchange with the earl, whose manner was putting me off at the moment. I knew the chancellor as a man of compassion and good judgment. Surely sixteen unexplained deaths beneath the streets of London should be arousing solicitude, not this show of lordly derision.

“What concerns me, my lord—or rather what concerns the Guildhall, and I am here on the city’s behalf—is not simply the murders.”

“Oh?”

“What is of most concern is the unknown identity of these men, their nameless anonymity. Particularly the manner of their deaths.”

His brow edged up. “And how did they die, Gower?”

I hesitated. “They had been shot, my lord. Though not with arrows or bolts.”

Silence.

“With guns, my lord.”

“Guns,” he said.

“Guns.”

“Cannon?” said Rune, leaning in.

I shook my head. “Something smaller, as the corpses were largely intact, drilled through with small shot. Nothing much larger than a child’s thumb ball.” My fingers brushed my thumb, recalling the heft of that first iron ball removed from one of the bodies, its killing weight.

The earl looked to the side. “Quite interesting.”

I waited, then said, “It is that, my lord.”

He glanced up at Rune, uneasily this time, then back at me. “Let me repeat my first question, Gower. What do you want?”

Once again I felt taken aback by the chancellor’s abrupt and peremptory tone, as if I were being impertinent with the questions I asked him, my presence a nuisance. “An answer, your lordship.”

“To what question?”

“Where did the killer or killers of these men procure these guns?”

“Explain yourself.”

“The city maintains no such handgonnes, as they are known. Nor are they in the possession of the church, and a hunter would hardly choose such instruments of war to bring down a hart. The only store of light artillery anywhere in or around London—if indeed a store exists at all—must lie within the Tower.”

Rune stepped out from behind me. I snapped my mouth shut and looked up at his protective sneer. “What are you implying, Gower? That the lord chancellor of England ordered the execution of sixteen unnamed men and had them thrown down a London privy?”

I showed him my palms, lowered my chin. “Nothing of the sort.” I looked back at the earl. “Forgive me if I sound accusatory, my lord.”

De la Pole waved a hand.

“I am merely suggesting that the weapons that took these men’s lives must have originated from within the royal army. As for who wielded them, and why—those are separate questions, and I am at a loss even to speculate at this point. But the guns strike me as a singular
piece of evidence. I should be surprised if they don’t lead us to the source of this horrific violence.”

“Westminster does not investigate common killings,” said Rune. “That is the work of sheriffs, justices, and constables, not chancellors and kings.”

“They are hardly common killings, my lord,” I said, keeping my eyes on the earl. “Over a dozen men, shot through with iron, left to rot beneath—”

“Rot. Now there’s an apt word, eh, Rune?” The chancellor looked at his secretary. “Rotting bodies, rotting rights, rotting laws. ”

“How have I earned your disfavor, my lord?” I said. “Given all that happened in May of last year, your words to me then . . .” I let my voice trail off, asking for a small favor, and a sharper recollection from the earl.

The moment lengthened until finally the chancellor sighed, drummed his fingers on his desk. His jaw shook slightly. “What you’ve described, these deaths. A horror, and I will lend you what limited assistance I am able. Yet my authority diminishes by the day. You must be aware of the situation with that young fiend the Duke of Gloucester and the earls. FitzAlan, Beauchamp, even Mowbray is in on this plot. They will rise up to oppose me in the coming Parliament, I’ll be bound, and against Oxford as well.”

“Though deservedly so, in his case,” Rune muttered.

The chancellor laughed gruffly at this dismissal of Robert de Vere, the king’s sweet-faced favorite, soon to be created duke if the rumors were true: a title properly reserved for those of royal blood, yet given to this braggart with little thought, and littler wisdom. A further sign of the young king’s disregard for tradition and propriety in his royal appointments.

“Is it really all as dire as you suggest, my lord?” I said.

The earl tightened his mouth against the tremors. “Imagine yourself standing in the middle of a field, Gower. A field that has been the ground beneath your feet your whole life. You’ve tilled it, sown it, harrowed it, harvested it, repeated the cycle dozens, perhaps hundreds of times in your memory. You know every inch of the place. You’ve dug every furrow, hefted every stone, broken every clod.”

His gaze moved to the stone behind me. “Suddenly, without warning, the ground begins to shift. You stumble on unfamiliar rocks, tangle yourself in weeds you thought you had torn out from the root long ago. The soil stirs in places, little patches at first but growing, widening, joining together, and soon the entire field is churning at your feet, surging to your ankles. Then, as you watch, parts of the field begin to fall away. Square feet, square yards, misshapen patches of ground the size of rooms, swallowed by the unforgiving earth. Beneath it all is darkness, a great void, and all that prevents you from pitching into it yourself is the final patch of ground beneath your feet.”

He sat silently for a time, statued in his narrow chair. “And now you are powerless to do anything but stand there,” he said, “waiting for that last bit of earth to dissolve, and you with it.”

The chancellor’s bleak vision of his deteriorating position left me rattled. I could scarcely believe it had come to this. For time out of mind Michael de la Pole had been a figure of staunch constancy in the realm, as solid as an oak or the stone cross on Cornhill.

“You are the king’s conscience, my lord,” I said. “If conscience is defeated, what shall become of the realm?”

He narrowed his aged eyes, all withered shapes and angles. “Conscience, that hidden little worm, mining our souls. King Richard, I am afraid, has lost his worm.”

A harsh laugh escaped Rune’s throat. I looked up at him as he covered it with a shallow cough. “You’ll want an avenue to the Tower, then,” Rune said to me.

At last.
“Though a twisted alley will be sufficient, my lord, so long as it leads me there by and by.”

“There is little enough to lose,” said the earl, gesturing for Rune to take a seat next to me. “Edmund, what do you say to our dark friend’s entreaty?”

Rune settled himself on the corner of my bench, elbows on his knees, his fingers steepled as he talked through the delicacies of the Tower and its administration. “The place is a labyrinth of competing interests. Lieutenants, captains, treasurers, stewards of the wardrobe, the king’s mint, the armorers and their craft, the chief officers of the
guard. Even the masons have their own little principality down there. Many pies, many fingers and arses to lick.”

“I know what you must be thinking, Gower,” said the earl before I could reply. “Shouldn’t the king’s own chancellor have free rein on Tower Hill?”

“The castle and its appurtenances should be adjuncts of your office, my lord,” I said. “As close as your own arm.”

“A severed arm, perhaps, and not my own,” he mused. “Often it feels as if the Tower is as distant from Westminster as Jerusalem itself, or the seat of the Great Khan.”

“There are many good men down there, your lordship,” Rune allowed. “Men with larger interests than their own.” He turned to me with a smirk. “Though not, perhaps, in the armory.”

“Who runs it these days?” I asked. The king’s armory, though of central importance to the military machinery of the crown, had rarely provoked my interest, and I had no hold on anyone in the king’s wardrobe, under whose jurisdiction the armory fell.

Rune’s grey eyes flicked briefly toward the earl. “William Snell. Armorer to the king.”

I had encountered the name, though never met the man. “What can you tell me about him?”

“Little enough,” the chancellor said slowly, bringing his hands together on his desk. “He is a quite remarkable person, our Snell. An exceptional man, of greatest importance to His Highness. King Richard appointed him at the request of his uncle some years ago, before all the factions started tearing at one another’s throats.”

“Lancaster?”

“Gloucester. Snell was a man-at-arms in the duke’s household, and he’s been the king’s armorer for going on nine years now.” Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, was the youngest of the king’s uncles, and one of the most powerful of the lords in the rival faction.

Further questions elicited from Rune and the earl that William Snell was at present charged with the building out and improvement of the king’s artillery. “Assembling as many guns as he can down there, more guns than the king’s armory has seen in all its history,” said
Rune. “And not only assembling, but improving, enhancing, inventing, searching for the newest techniques and devices from Burgundy and Milan, the best men to rival their makers. He is also amassing gunpowder sufficient for a year’s siege and a great battle to follow. Why, last week I was given a bill for a quantity of saltpetre so immense that I sent my clerk back to the Exchequer twice in an hour simply to check the numbers.”

“And he is doing all of this with King Richard’s approval?” I asked.