The Invention of Fire (17 page)

The soldier said nothing.

“I want to see his cell.” I fished a quarter noble from my purse. He looked at it, took a glance in either direction and then the coin. His head angled slightly toward the narrow walkway.

“Have your pleasure, sire. I’ve not got the key, but you’ll see all there is to see through the bars.”

As I rounded the tower the smell hit me. Not the accustomed stench of the hermit’s filth, but a mingled air of burned wood and cloth. Beneath it was something darker, animal in its intensity. A lingering smell of cooked flesh.

The day’s light was fading, though enough remained to illuminate the chamber behind the barred window, where I knelt as if at prayer. Scorch marks were visible on the sides and top of the small opening and along portions of the inner walls, which were marred by several blackened patches. One of them was a blurred handprint. Yet the cell itself had been emptied and cleaned, Piers Goodman’s meager belongings removed. In their place, along the far wall and protected from the weather, now stood a dozen powder kegs, banded and marked with the livery of the king’s wardrobe at the Tower.

Back at the crossing I slipped the guard another coin. “Tell me all you know.”

He glanced over his shoulder, gave a slight shrug. “Not overmuch,” he said. “Got shuffled up here from the Newgate guard only this morning. The old fellow died, is what he did, and they hauled him to St.
Bart’s or Spitalfields. Would have been two, three days ago. Burned his things in place rather than deal with the scent, then cleaned out the room and loaded it with powder.”

One of the city’s most durable hermits, tossed in a pauper’s grave. “Who burned him out?”

The guard’s eyes widened, then narrowed as he caught the implication of my question and the tone of my voice. He sucked in his lower lip and turned slightly to the side. His head bobbed in the direction of the next tower along the wall. “See that fellow up top?”

“Yes,” I said, pretending to discern the distant guard against the darkening sky.

“That’s Burgess there. He saw it all. Heard it, too. Ask him.”

Burgess, thankfully, was a guard I knew, a solid and trustworthy denizen of the London walls who’d sold me any number of useful scraps over the years. Soon after leaving the crossing I was climbing the next tower, the highest between Cripplegate and the postern below the Moorfields. As I came to his side he turned to greet me with a nod and a tightening of his lips. He waved away my coin. “You’re asking after our Piers?” he guessed.

“I am,” I said. “What did you see, Burgess?”

“A pack of Tower dogs done the thing,” he told me, his jaw rigid with his indignation. He gestured me to a crenel at the edge of the parapet. I gazed through the gap in the stone. Piers Goodman’s former home was situated below us and to the north, the scorched window clearly visible from where we stood.

“Seen it all from right here, this very spot,” he said. “They wedged the door from the outside, then shoved a clutch a torches and an armful of faggots through the bars. Poor old fellow never had a chance, did he?”

“And they were Tower men?” I asked him. “You are quite sure of it?”

“Sure’s a man can be,” he said. “One of those badged gangs. Wardrobe men, a dozen strong.”

It was one of the emerging divisions within the military ranks, increasingly sharp as England prepared for war with France. Though
the soldiers manning the nearly two miles of city walls could be a proud bunch, the London guard was generally considered a lesser station than the Tower garrison. Even within the Tower itself there were fiercely guarded distinctions among the regular infantry squadrons and several more elite units of highly trained men charged with special missions and duties for the king, and regarded with an accordant mix of fear and awe. At the top of this latter group were the guards of the Tower wardrobe, a handpicked company of elite fighters whose particular duty entailed the full and final defense of the great stores of wealth and instruments of royal power held in the treasury and the armory at the Tower: gold, jewels, the royal mint, the privy seal, gunpowder. It was one of these companies, I suspected, that had descended upon Piers Goodman’s filthy lair to torch him from life.

At an odd sound from the soldier I looked back at him. His voice hitched as he tried to speak. Tears spilled down his young cheeks. I waited for his words.

“Piers, you know, he—he never screamed,” said the man. “Nor never cried out when they came for him and cooked him, even when the flames and smokes were pushing out that window there. Piers, he just chanted that bit of foulness he’d always be sparrowing through his bars.”

The soldier smiled sadly at the recollection, then, to my surprise, started to sing, a weak warble from his tongue at first, a faraway look in his hardened eyes as he chanted words I had heard a dozen times from Piers Goodman’s raving lips. “
I loved and lost and lost again, my beard hath grown so grey
—”

From somewhere below us another voice took up the tune. “
When God above doth ease my pain my cock shall rise to play.
”

A second guard at the lower parapet, adding a strong burden to the hermit’s tune. The two of them continued with the next verse.

By the end of the verse two more guards had joined in, and as if by silent assent the four of them, then a fifth, then a sixth and a seventh began the hermit’s song anew, and soon the rough and growing choir of city guards and gatekeepers had become so many links in a sonorous chain stretching into the distance, as far as a man could hear.

It was as if the entire northern wall of London were come alive to breathe the hermit’s song, to throw its stony echoes off dozens of churches and inns, to bowl its tuneful hopes down the narrowest alleys and along the widest streets of ward and parish, to fill the great city beneath the early stars at dusk, and to soften a hard, impregnable wall with this rough requiem for its most durable inhabitant.

As the bawdy song of Piers Goodman filled the gathering dark I found my own lips shaping the hermit’s peculiar words, my tired lungs filling and emptying with his melancholy chant, like a creaky bellows gladdened with unfamiliar air. Dozens of soldiers were visible from our high parapet, their solemn faces down above Cripplegate and beyond lit with torches and lanterns against the coming of the night, as together we sang the death of the kindest, maddest, most selfless man we had ever known. A man who gave his life to God and to our city, burned to death in recompense.

Yet there was more than a shared fondness or melancholy intoned among the singers that night along the walls. Beneath the voices of these men, London soldiers all, was intermingled a note of defiance,
a faintly mutinous undertone of discontent at the Tower’s wanton destruction of a harmless, joyous man.

To kill a hermit is a serious thing indeed. To burn a hermit alive, though, to trap him like a caged animal and crackle the very fat and flesh from his bones—this was something else. This, we all of us proclaimed in Piers Goodman’s fading song, this was evil.

N
EITHER SLEPT THAT NIGHT
nor the following, and though they remained in their separate spaces, between them there grew a new, unspoken intimacy, born of desperation and fear. There was no question of leaving the inn and their company, of venturing out along the roads alone, not after hearing of the highwaymen who had injured the boy and killed his father. Nor could they simply let chance take its course. A decision had to be made.

Though not this very hour, perhaps. “Tell me of your crimes, Robert,” she said into the dark.

His breath stopped. “My crimes?” he said from the floor.

“What put you in the Portbridge gaol?”

“That. Well.” He sniffed. “A hundred pigeons, a dozen hinds, a boar, a faun or two.”

“Yet you are a cook,” she said.

“I am.”

She propped herself up on an elbow. “Then by your station you are naturally accustomed to dealing in beasts and fowl for your lord. Why would such things put you in gaol?”

“I am a poacher, aren’t I. No problems stewing harts and peacocks from those given license to shoot ’em, like m’lord on his hunts. But shoot ’em myself, to coin off the meat and hide and feathers? A gallows stands at the end of that road. They rode me on a pillory wagon through half
the villages of Kent before tossing me in the gaol at Portbridge. Would have been the king’s justice at Westminster but for the guns.”

“Was this your first arrest?”

He laughed softly. “Hardly. Was my tenth, eleventh. They’d finally had enough of Robert Faulk, that’s sure.”

She thought about this. A common criminal ravishing the hunting grounds of dukes and lords, likely going after the same hinds and boars pursued by her husband, though with much more skill and cunning. Yet in his work he was no better than a butcher. To Margery there seemed little difference between taking a hart in a royal wood and cutting up mutton in the kitchens. To put a man to death for the crime of killing a deer?

“In the woods,” she said.

“Yes.”

“You shot like a royal archer. It is why we are alive.”

“You are why I am alive.”

He had said it simply, instantly. She felt a rush of desire.

“You spared me, Dame Marg—”

“No.”

“You spared me, Margery. I saved you. There was no choice in the matter.”

Some minutes passed. From far off in the hills came a long and lonesome wail, followed by another. She moved her elbow and settled back into the pallet, listening to the plaintive song of the wolves.

“And your crimes, Elizabeth?” he asked softly.

She’d thought he was asleep. She considered her reply. “I am also a killer of beasts,” she eventually said. “Well . . . one beast.”

AT DAWN, AS THE LOW
bell tolled from the small parish church down the road, she woke to find him staring at his feet in the rising light. He sat on the floor of their room as if frozen, his long body angled against the wall. At the inn’s waking bell, when companies on pilgrimage were to gather in the hall, he refused to come with her. She willed him to find the strength, urged him to rise. He would not move.

“You cannot remain in this room all day, Robert,” she pleaded.

She looked at him, willing that new confidence to return from wherever it had fled. He would not meet her eyes. She left him there, bent and afraid.

In the kitchen the keeper’s wife shredded greens. The curly leaves went in a heaping basket, the stalks in a pail for the hogs. On the long, narrow table dividing the room was a basket of pears, blushed a deep red. “May I take one, please?” she asked.

“Course, mistress,” said the wife, offering her the lot. She took one of the fruits. Softened with ripeness, the pear’s skin gave beneath her thumb, spreading a thimble’s worth of juice along her skin. She wiped it on her sleeve.

In their room she handed him the pear. Its light heft and perfect ripeness seemed to enliven him. From a pouch at his side he pulled a knife. He looked up at her from the floor, holding the fruit between them.

An offer. She nodded and sat.

First he cored it, plunged the big knife in from the bottom and drew forth the seeds and stem in a single movement. He set the core aside, a short length of stick, flesh, and clinging seeds. Then, more slowly, he separated the peel, curling it from the flesh in one long, delicate spiral. His fingers were quick like a child’s, nimble despite the size and strength of his hands. He palmed the quartered pear. She took a wedge. The sweet juice moistened her lips, dribbled to her chin. She moved to wipe it off with her sleeve but his hand had risen to the task, though he withdrew it before he touched her. She reached daringly for it, brought it to her face, moved his thumb across her chin, her lips, her nose. She kissed the pear juice from the rough pad, then pushed his hand back to his crossed ankles.

She returned to the common room to find the other women in their company already gathered around a table.

“And where is your man of sorrows, Mistress Elizabeth?” said Constance, nudging her sister’s arm.

“Swinking off his debt through Nocturns, I hope and expect,” Catherine chimed in.

Margery gave the sisters a coy smile, raised her brow slightly, let them think what they would. She joined them at the common table. The food was simple, a spiced rye gruel with cream in a trencher of heavy, dark bread. She sat and ate, hardly tasting the meal as the mixed companies held forth in subdued conversations around the front room.

Eventually the keeper came in to stand at the hearth and speak to his guests about their wishes for the day and night. The burial of the brigands’ victim would take place that afternoon in the parish churchyard, he said, with four shillingsworth for the parson and the sexton’s diggers. A cup was passed around, purses opened, bright clinks of pennies and groats. She put in a half noble, a gentlewoman’s share. After a brief consultation among the men, the decision was made in her own company to stay on in the village for a third night, out of respect for the widow and her son.

The keeper stepped down from the hearth and made way for a stooping, bashful man who had arrived at the inn with the smaller Canterbury group. He fidgeted and hawed for a few moments, then voiced his request. “We would like to join ourselves to your fellowship, good gentles, if you will have us. The road north to Durham is long and, as we have already known, perilous. We have a widow and her child among us. The pall of death hangs over our sacred purpose. Yet there is safety of body in higher numbers. Good fortune in newly joined hands. Will you have us?”

Their own company huddled and conferred in a corner. No one could find a strong reason to object to joining the second pilgrimage to their own. True, a larger company made for more difficulty in finding lodging—though they would be on main highways the entire journey, with many inns along the way. The presence of a child might complicate things—though who could deny this bereft boy and his grieving mother the gift of greater fellowship?

Margery listened silently. Saying something contrary would only arouse suspicions. The decision was made with little delay. Afterward the mood in the room lightened despite the coming burial, as the two companies mingled and met, swapped bits of their lives and stories,
becoming one. They would be twenty now, a full and merry group for the still-lengthy journey to Durham.

She sat alone, weighted by the decision. They had hoped for a clear separation from the Canterbury group, assuming the other company would stay behind for the burial. Now it seemed inevitable that this widow would see Robert. Perhaps know him.

In their chamber she told him the news. His eyes grew wild, unfocused as he paced the floor. He glanced out past the shutters more than once, as if planning to flee.

She stood in his way. He looked down at her, his breaths coming quickly. She put her hands on his face, tangled her fingers in his thick beard, and made him look at her. “Sit just there,” she said, gesturing to a place along the wall. “Wait for me.” He sat.

Back to the kitchen, where she procured a basin of heated water from the keeper’s wife, who also slipped her a clump of wood lye mixed with honey—a soap we keep only for our gentle guests, she explained.

In their chamber, seated before him on the floor, she warmed the soap with the water and lathered her hands. The lye filled the air between them with a sweet and homely scent, reminding her of another, less trying time.

“Your knife,” she said. He reached behind himself for the knife, which he placed on the floor between them.

First she worked the soap through his beard. The hairs were not overly long but dark, rich, thick with the scents of woodsmoke and travel. Their rough ends abraded her fingertips like sand or soil. His cheeks moved beneath them, bulging up to his surprised eyes, lowering to thicken his jaw. She reached for more soap and spread the lather on his neck, used her palms to smooth the creamed lye down along the gentle slope to the top of his chest. She rinsed her hands, dried them on her dress, then reached for the knife.

Her hands hesitated before his face. Yet how difficult could it be? She pictured Thomas, the barber-surgeon who shaved her father over all those years. Twice a month he would arrive with his straight
knife and his gangly apprentice, to stand out in the manor foreyard, beneath the small elm, and service the whiskers of his lordship, who had always preferred the blade to the pumice stone for his shaves. He would sit in his great hall chair, brought outside by two servants for the occasion, obeying Thomas’s instructions to tilt his head to the left, to lean back, to raise his chin. It was the same Thomas who would cut open her mother, saving her last child while leaving her to die of flux in the wake of the birth. Part of her hated the man after that, but the shavings continued without a pause. She remembered the quick and expert flicks of the blade, the pleasing rasp as steel met skin.

Her own hands moved slowly, inching the flat edge of the blade along his cheeks, gathering hair and lye in a humped line, like a row of raised dirt between furrows. She stretched his skin, scraped his neck, fingered his ears. His eyes never left hers as the knife discovered those angles and dimensions of his face she had not yet noticed, much less appreciated, but now had time to sculpt and clean.

She cut him twice. A nick below his left ear, easily stanched. Another above his upper lip, to which he held his sleeve as she cleaned the blade. She looked at him. Without his beard he appeared if anything more of a gentleman, not less, despite the current fashion. A high brow now fitting to his face, eyes that could look both kind and severe, a strong jaw keeping a rigid course to below his ears before angling up to frame his lower hairline.

He flexed his jaw as she inspected him. He took her hand. “A while longer, Elizabeth,” he said to her, in that new voice he’d learned. “Give me the smallest while, then I shall join you out front. Go now.”

He emerged from their chamber in the middle of the afternoon, his back straight, his eyes clear, his chin right where it should be. He said nothing to the widow, keeping a distance from the new pilgrims joined to their company.

From the next bench she watched him eat a sop. The morning bread was gone, so he sipped the thin broth from a shallow tin bowl. The tendons along his newly clean neck pulsed with his generous
swallows, hardly tentative yet not too large for a gentleman. She admired her work.

EARLY THE NEXT MORNING,
with the dead pilgrim in the ground, the joined companies gathered in the yard, where the din of departure brought the keeper’s dogs from the barn to nuzzle and sniff for scraps. The inn’s stableboys led the horses to the blocks, then locked hands and pushed their guests’ feet to get everyone mounted in turn. As she adjusted herself on the animal’s back her own helper stood by, his young eyes aglint with hope. Once astride she pressed a penny into his hand, and almost flinched at the touch of his skin, which despite the boy’s youth was the texture of
his,
and jolted her accordingly.

The boy or someone else had stuffed her saddle well. It filled the width between her upper thighs with a pleasing firmness, rubbing her just there as the horse’s muscled back worked beneath her and a confessor’s old injunction sang in her mind.
The saddle of thine horse shall be patience and purity, that thou may be patient in adversity and pure in the flesh.
Not my saddle, she mused as she followed Robert through the wooden gate, thrown open to the road for the company’s departure. The saddle of mine horse shall be lust and want, that I may be quick in swinking and sated in the bed. She shuddered, let out a held breath.

They left the village at the stroke of seven, twenty pilgrims strong. A few last houses, thatched roofs and low-cut hay, a sheepfold spilling onto a heath; groan of leather adjusting to new use, clank of pans on the cook’s packhorse.

The widow shared a nag with her son, and as the company rounded the first bend in the road Margery turned to look at the woman’s face, wan and sad. All that day she watched the widow carefully, observing the ways she tended to her son, now able to sit up on the saddle against his mother. Their occasional weeping was a sad music to the fellowship as the diminished family mourned the loss of a father and husband to a highwayman’s blade.

IT WAS THE BOY
who gave them away. The pilgrims had stopped for a rest and refreshment, just short of a wide area where the road had been washed out by a crossing stream. The horses were led to the water, and the women spread food on blankets up along the higher bank. Later, as they remounted and rode from their rest, the woman and her son started to edge closer. The boy was whispering to his mother, his eyes on them. On him, Robert.

The company forded another, smaller stream. A step, a light jump, the horses having no trouble managing the crossing. Once on the far bank the widow and her son closed the distance, and when they were alongside she looked him full in the face. “Why, you are Faulk! I
knew
it,” the widow said, too loudly. Several of the other pilgrims turned toward them, their curiosity sparked by the widow’s first words in hours.