The Invention of Fire (20 page)

Her ears rang with more hisses and cracks and pops. By the time the second round was fired, her ears were too full to hear the screams, though she saw the open mouths, the clutched chests, the ravaged limbs.

At the center of it all she saw Donard, her once and always king, bleeding and ruined on the ground.

I
DONIA BREMBRE, QUEEN OF LONDON
.

The daughter of a prominent vintner, the mayor’s wife was as strong and intimidating a London presence as ever during those last weeks of her husband’s final turn at the head of the city. A series of coerced elections, silent bribes, and brutal struggles with Northampton had left Brembre in a precarious position upon his last assumption of the mayoralty, and the wagering then was that his rule would last mere days or weeks rather than the full mayoral term. Yet Idonia had weathered every crisis standing by her husband’s side, giving him a pillar to lean on and a shelter from political storms both powerful and relentless. At the Guildhall her name was whispered in mingled tones of fear and submission, and more than one dispute among the aldermen and guildmasters had been resolved in her household chapel. It was often said that what little Nicholas lacked in iron, Idonia made up in silk.

The Brembres inhabited a fine three-story house in Bread Street Ward near Gissor’s Hall and the church of St. Mildred. The way widened somewhat at that point, inspiring Idonia to commission a low-walled forecourt to be built onto the front. Pushing out into the street nearly fifteen feet, the structure had the added virtue of forcing passersby to move across as they went along and thus take in the full view of the Brembre domain from the far side of the lane. Idonia saw to
making this view a colorful, even splendid one, with fresh paint and wash every season, gilt trim along the jambs and sills. There was always a crowd gathered out front when Nicholas was at home. When I arrived that afternoon I was happy to note the absence of that usual press of fawners and flatterers all waiting for a taste of mayoral largesse. I wanted to speak with Idonia alone, and without being observed.

I approached the forecourt door, a burnished span of dark wood embossed with the Brembre arms of three sable rings and mullet, and was stopped by an idling guard. Initially he refused to hear my request, claiming the lady of the house was still out of town, though my purse convinced him to relent.

“A moment,” he said, then unlatched the door and went within. He was back quickly with Brembre’s yeoman, who ran his city house during his steward’s travels with the mayor.

“Lady Idonia is completing a letter,” he said as he gestured me within. “She will see you in the parlor.”

I followed him through the screens passage. Such letters were a peculiarity of Idonia Brembre’s reign as the mayor’s wife, part of a more general effort to nose out and manage every detail of her husband’s jurisdiction. At least two or three times a week she would send out a clutch of written instruments in her own name, and sealed with her ring. “Idonia’s snowflakes,” these missives were not so fondly called, their various cajolings, commands, and commendations delivered to their recipients with all the ceremony of a royal patent.

I had received one of these letters myself several years before, during her husband’s second term, expressing gratitude for a minor difficulty I had helped to resolve on the mayor’s behalf, while also requesting that I avoid any future entanglements with the Brembre household.
Women and writing? Not a happy mix,
the bishop of Ely had once observed upon finding himself in receipt of one of Idonia’s terser missives. In Idonia’s case the mix was an unusually potent one.

The oblong parlor spread out from the hall door along the north side of the house. A servant guided me to the far corner of the room, where Idonia sat at a writing table. The mayor’s wife had a narrow but not unattractive face, festooned that day with a coverchiefed hat of
heavy ground and elaborate decoration. Her nose, quite sharp, looked out of place on a face and head so delicate, though the unnerving radiance of her eyes drew the viewer’s attention upward and inward. She rarely blinked these eyes, yet they seemed to remain watery almost to the point of tears while she spoke.

“Gower,” she said, staying seated but gazing at me moistly. She looked uneasy, as if I might be about to pull a blade on her.

“Lady Idonia.” I stood by her writing table. It was littered from one end to the other with parchment and paper in haphazard piles.

“What can you want with me?” she said. “My husband the mayor is out at Gravesend. Surely it is my lord with whom you wish to converse.” Precise speech, her diction well above her natural station as a vintner’s daughter.

“What I have to say is not for the mayor’s ears, Lady Idonia. He would surely object to my presence here, though I hope once you hear what I have to say you will prove more solicitous.” I waited for a reaction, saw the smallest flicker in her steady gaze. I imagined myself taking a deep breath, casting in the dark, then said, “You and your husband have a difficult situation that needs resolving. I have come to offer you my assistance.”

She squinted at me, in a way that suggested the need of spectacles. I was tempted to offer her my own, though kept my generosity at bay.

“What exactly is it that you
do,
Gower?”

The randomness of the question surprised me. “My lady?”

“What do you do with your time? You are neither a merchant nor a knight, nor do you practice the law in any official way. You slink about London and Westminster like a rat with a florin in its gut, expecting everyone you meet to scurry down your throat to find it. Yet I cannot comprehend how you maintain your station and status in our city, nor from where your evident wealth derives. So I ask again. What is it you
do
?”

Insulting, imperious Idonia. The first bell sounded from St. Mildred. “I find things, I suppose,” I said in the space before the next clap. My clouded gaze lingered on the window, then turned slowly back on her. “Then I sell them. Or use them.”

She quivered, like a frightened doe at a rustle of leaves. Another stroke rang out, then dissolved in the parish air. Her narrow frame was shifting on her chair, and in her body’s unease I saw her acquiescence.“Well then,” she said, trying to smile. “Well then, I hope you might use these skills in finding something for me, and for his lordship the mayor. The peace of the city depends upon its safe recovery.” Her unblinking eyes finally blinked.

“What is it you hope me to find, my lady?”

“A letter.”

“What does it concern?”

“Merely the purchase of some yellow silk for a set of new dresses I desire.”

I sensed even in her condition the toying amusement she was taking with me. “Surely there is more to this letter than yellow silk.”

“My own letter holds no peril for anyone, Gower, let alone my husband. The overleaf, on the other hand . . .” She looked away, seeming confused, her hand agitating the cloth at her lap.

Her suggestion fit with what I knew of her epistolary habits. The thrifty Idonia was known to reuse numerous specimens of writing from her house’s extensive cabinets of books and muniments, never wanting a good piece of parchment to go to waste. Shop inventories, account books, old court transcripts, even leaves from disused prayer books: all were fodder for her missives. Recipients of her correspondence, myself included, would often find one side of a letter lazily scratched or blotted out, the other filled with her peculiar commands. In this case, it seemed, she had salvaged a piece of writing she shouldn’t have.

“Did you read the overleaf yourself, my lady?”

“I did not, nor could I have done, as it was written in Latin. I simply wrote what I wished and sent it off with a servant, who gave it for delivery to a page, who was beaten to within an inch of his life for the transgression. The letter was intercepted, by whom I do not know, and now Nicholas claims it has imperiled his office, his station—his life.”

“So you are ignorant of the nature of the document that prompts the lord mayor’s concern.”

She huffed. “If I weren’t, I certainly wouldn’t tell you, Gower. The distaff only hits so hard on a poor husband.”

“Would it surprise you to learn that it was an interrogation record?” I asked her.

She looked away.

“Your husband was implicated in a crime or scandal of some kind, yes?”

The slightest of nods.

“And now someone is holding it over him, playing him like a glove puppet.”

Another nod.

“But you don’t know who this is.”

A shake. I waited for her to turn to me before telling her. “Lady Idonia, the interrogation record is in the hands of Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester.” Her eyes went wide. “The only way I can help you and your husband is if I learn the nature of the mayor’s offense—and the name of the party questioned at the Guildhall. Before approaching Gloucester I need as much on this matter as you will give me. The mayor, as you are quite aware, is saying nothing.”

Her hand had moved to her lips, her face gone the color of new vellum. She blinked several times, then clasped her hands in her lap. “It was a maudlyn, Gower,” she said. “A common whore of Gropecunt Lane, and Nicholas one of its most frequent jakes. I don’t know its name.”

“I see,” I said. Though Idonia had been understandably humiliated, the information was deflating. Half the grown men of London frequented the precincts above St. Pancras Soper Lane. A loose-tongued maudlyn would hardly imperil a man as powerful as Nicholas Brembre. Before I could explain this gently to Idonia she told me more.

“This was not just any maudlyn, Gower.”

“Oh?”

“It—she—he—is a swerver.”

I felt myself recoil. “So Sir Nicholas is—”

“A sodomite. The abominable vice, practiced with glee and regularity
by the honorable lord mayor of London, paying a man to take a woman’s part.”

And with a sworn record of confession to prove it. Though the crown and city did not prosecute sodomy as a civic matter, such a document could subject the mayor to an ecclesiastical tribunal before the bishop of London, who would surely relish the chance to humiliate Brembre in front of the city’s most prominent clergymen. Excommunication would inevitably follow. The mayor stood to lose everything: his office, his livelihood, his parish, and likely his wife, who would surely be granted an annulment as a result of her husband’s vice.

I leaned to look through the screens passage toward the door, then turned back to Idonia. “Why did Sir Nicholas not destroy the record after seizing it, given its obvious dangers? He is not a reckless man, in my experience.”

She narrowed her eyes. “I asked him the same question. He claims other men were named in the document, and that destroying it would rob him of information on them. So he put it in the chest in our bedchamber, along with piles of meaningless scraps from the Guildhall scriptorium. Some eight weeks ago I was out of parchments, so I fished one of them out, wrote my letter, and the rest of it you know.”

Keeping the interrogation record was understandable on the mayor’s part, if foolish. Better to forestall your own damnation than hold another man’s ruin in your hand. Yet Brembre had made a very large wager and lost badly, leaving his wife shamed and his own reputation hanging by the thinnest of threads—threads I fully intended to pull.

I
GIVE YOU THE GREATEST
commission of your life.” William Snell’s voice had lowered to a soft threat. “A chance to forge and shape your infernal metals on behalf of the very king of England, to craft some new invention from the veins of the earth. And what do you bring me? A little
snake
? A
child’s
toy, tapped out in the smithy?”

“It is hardly a toy, Master Snell.” It has, after all, killed a breathing body, Stephen did not say. One false word, he suspected, and Snell would have him tossed over the wall. Yet with the lethal accident in the woods still numbing his mind, Stephen would not allow himself to cower before the armorer’s rising wrath. His gun worked, worked all too well, and he was at the Tower that day to prove this to the man who had commissioned it.

“The shape is serpentine, yes, and I will admit to taking special care to the design and crafting of its outer appearance,” he said. “But the snake is merely a disguise. A trick of the eye, meant to deceive anyone who discovers it, and hide the nature of your commission to me. As to the function and purpose of the device—to these, the snake is incidental.”

“And now you confuse me with all this metalman’s cant.” Snell threw up his hands. “Can you not speak plainly to me, Marsh, and tell why you have mocked us in this way?”

“If you will allow me—”

“Allow you
what
? Further patience or forbearance? Not from this quarter of the Tower, Marsh.”

“Yet if you will only let me show you, Master Snell. I believe you will be more than pleased. I ask merely for a demonstration on my part, and an observance on yours.”

Snell stood there, chewing on a jutting lip. “An observance.”

“A matter of minutes,” said Stephen.

The armorer sniffed. “Very well, then. Prepare yourself.”

“Aye,” said Stephen. Without further delay he took the bundle from beneath his arm and unwrapped the four weapons he had brought along for that day. He lifted Flame, the greatest and deadliest of his guns, the straightest in bore, the truest in aim, the elmwood stock as smooth against his palm as a woman’s flank.

“What do you have there?” Snell demanded. “One of our handgonnes, stolen from the Tower?”

“Not the king’s gun, Master Snell, but a smaller replica,” said Stephen, dismayed that his imitation could pass for one of the armorer’s rough originals. “A shorter barrel and stock, a lesser weight, though the same width of shot.” He handed the gun to the armorer. Snell hefted it, turned it about in his hands, palmed the barrel and stock. He gave it back to Stephen.

“A well-made gun,” he said, with some reluctance.

“Aside from size and weight, the sole difference between this gun and your own lies in these three holes I have drilled into the barrel several inches back from the touchhole. Do you see?” He showed Snell the small bores placed in a tight triangle just where the stock met the barrel.

“Their purpose?” the armorer asked.

Marsh swallowed. The moment had come. “I have carefully observed the usage of these weapons, Master Snell,” he said. “I have seen how your soldiers prepare them and fire them. There must always be two men, each working toward a single firing of the gun. One steadies the gun and takes aim, the other prepares the coal for the touch. One holds the gun in place, the other lowers the coal to the powder. The
gun fires, and the process begins anew, the same two men laboring over a single weapon and the multiple tasks required to deploy it.”

“What is your point, Marsh?”

“My point, Master Snell, is efficiency.”

Stephen saw it, that flash of bureaucratic longing in Snell’s eyes. “Explain yourself.”

“Take your archers,” he said, sweeping a hand in the direction of the armory, where so many thousands of bows, bolts, and arrows were stored. “Picture a company of fine English longbowmen, engaged in battle, the sky bristling with arrows at each volley. Fifty archers, fifty arrows hurling toward the enemy in one fell rush.” He paused to allow the scene to play out in the armorer’s imagination. “Now cut that number in half. Imagine the spectacle such a scene would become if every bowman were dependent on—on an
arrowman
for the loading of his bow.”

“An arrowman?”

“An arrowman,” said Stephen, with new confidence in the comparison. “Each time the archer readies his weapon, he must depend upon an arrowman to fit nock to string, shaft to knuckle. Your arrowman stands next to your archer for the duration of the battle, pulling arrows from his quiver between shots, assisting the bowman in the laborious task of mounting the arrow or fitting the nock, or—or releasing the string. Imagine it, Master Snell. Imagine if your bowman were incapable of releasing the string himself. If the technology of the bow were such that another man’s hand was required to perform the crucial task of releasing the string and sending the arrow on its way. What would be the effect in the field of battle?”

In the narrowing of the armorer’s eyes Stephen saw the first glimmer of discernment. “Fewer arrows.”

“Correct,” said Stephen. “More men, yet fewer arrows in the air. To get the same number of arrows presently shot from fifty bows by fifty men, your company of archers would have to be doubled in size. More men, more mouths to feed, more horses, more supplies—”

“Yet less death,” the armorer mused, bringing a hand to his mouth. Snell’s words raised a chill on Stephen’s arms. “Go on, Marsh.”

“Now, Master Snell, consider these handgonnes of yours redesigned in such a way so as to mimic the self-sufficiency of the longbow and the arrow, or the crossbow and the bolt. Rather than seeing a company paired along the line, two at each weapon, you would have in battle a solid wall of gunmen, each capable of loading, aiming, and firing his own gun, from beginning to end. We remove the need for a companion to touch the flame to the powder. Give the gunman himself that capability, and thus the power to hold, aim, and fire all on his own.”

“And your snaky device here promises this innovation?”

“It does.”

Snell’s eyes narrowed. “I shall be quite impressed if this proves true.”

Marsh bowed slightly. “There is more.”

“Yes?”

“This design promises two increases in efficiency, the first of personnel, the second—and perhaps the more important—of portability.”

“Explain.”

“It is one of the great barriers to efficiency presented by these weapons. In order to fire the powder, you must have a ready source of flame. As I have observed in the case of the Tower’s guns, a coal or stick is placed in the fire, then lifted and held to the pan. Anyone who wishes to deploy a gun in battle must be positioned next to a fire pit, and must fight from a stationary position.”

“Yes, the evidence of warfare bears this out,” Snell mused. “The guns deployed at Aljubarrota last year could only be fired in place. Their use on the battlefield was quite limited. They were wielded by immobile infantry rather than riding cavalry, to the detriment of the Castilian effort—though it must be said, they struck terror in the heart of Lisbon. Until the cursed barrels blew apart.” He looked closely at Flame, reached out to stroke her stock. “I have wished for a means of rendering these guns portable. What do you propose, Marsh?”

“What impedes their use on horseback, or even by infantry at a run, master, is the matter of fire,” said Stephen. “A burning stick will expire in the wind. A hot coal cannot be carried for long in the
hand. The only means of getting adequate flame to the task is for every gunner to have a fire near at hand—and no soldier is capable of carrying fire with him into battle.”

Snell scoffed. “You’ve not heard of torches?”

A question Stephen had expected. “It would be difficult beyond reckoning to hold a torch, light a match from it, and aim and fire a gun, all with the same two hands. The need for a torch, and thus another man to bear it, only brings out all the more clearly the problem of efficiency.”

“I happily concede the point, Marsh.”

“What is needed, then, is a means of firing the powder in the pan with a tool ready to hand. A carried flame, able to be deployed near and far, whether mounted or on foot. More than this, an ability to fire more quickly than ever before.” He held up a short length of twine. “Each gun, I believe, should be equipped with one of these.”

Snell took it from him, fingered it, held it before his nose. “What is it?”

“Simply a cord soaked in saltpetre, then dried and cut to length. Saltpetre burns slowly when not mixed with charcoal and sulfur. This cord will glow happily in place or at a run, and even in a fearsome wind. When affixed to the device I have created, it will light as many as a dozen pans of powder, with minor adjustments as the shots proceed.” He took the cord back from Snell, fixed it within the snake’s mouth, then pushed it down and up again, demonstrating the agility of his device.

Snell stared at the mechanism. “One man to fire, then, and he may move about the battlefield as he wishes, firing multiple times from any position—and without the need for a source of flame.”

“Yes, Master Snell. Thus increasing the element of surprise.”

The armorer hefted the gun again, then sighted down its barrel toward the nearest span of wall. “Had a hundred Castilians with such handgonnes ridden against King John’s several guns, Portugal might have fallen after all. And your snake simply attaches to the stock and barrel?”

Marsh took the gun and began to affix the snake in its proper position.
Back at Stone’s he had designed a simple clip to hold the device in place while the three bolts were tightened. Once the snake was attached he removed the clip and slipped it in the pouch at his side. All was done smoothly, as Marsh had practiced every maneuver a dozen times during his half day in the woods.

“Ready for a firing, Master Snell.”

“You’ll need a target.” The armorer signaled to one of his attending guards. He whispered in the man’s ear and nodded in the direction of the barbican. “The elder one.”

“Aye, sire,” said the soldier. He walked briskly off, signaling to another guard to follow him.

“It won’t be long, Marsh,” said Snell, with a sly grin. “Please continue your preparations.”

Stephen checked the serpentine for a second time, tightening the bolts, scraping out the touchhole, testing the serpentine’s hinge. When he looked up a small company was walking toward them from the direction of the barbican.

“Richard Wolde,” Snell murmured to the soldier by his side. “A lover of cats. He swyves with them, it’s said.”

“And the softest ewes as well,” one of his men put in.

Snell laughed from his belly as the strange company approached. Behind them strode a lion. A body impossibly long, the head framed by an immense mane of particolored hair, gold-flecked blacks and browns. Upon its mouth was fastened a stout leather muzzle, the animal’s lips and whiskers barely visible beneath the thick straps. The paws were huge, though a rear one appeared injured, as the beast was clearly favoring it. A lengthy tail played in the air as the lion limped along, not, as the beast books claimed, furtively clearing away his own tracks, but held upright and proud, its curled length whipping from side to side: the part of the great animal that seemed most truly wild.

Stephen had seen the king’s cats only once, years ago, during that long season of celebration marking King Richard’s coronation, when the Tower menagerie was thrown open to all England for gaping and delight. The animals were so foreign to the English mind, so unlike their unmoving counterparts depicted in the various liveries of the
realm. Lions rampant and supine, lions embossed and embroidered: these were as nothing compared with the living, breathing cats themselves.

The man Snell had identified as Richard Wolde stepped forward from the group and stuck out his chest. “By what rights do your men bring this beast from the menagerie, Snell?” Small of bone, nearly dwarflike in stature, Wolde made a comical figure as he confronted the powerful armorer in his domain.

“The beast’s time has come,” Snell said. “Can’t be helped, I’m afraid.”

Wolde weakly scoffed. “You are a mere armorer, Snell. I am keeper of lions and leopards for King Richard. This is
my
lion.”

“
Your
lion? Hardly. This is the Tower’s lion, Wolde, and thus the king’s. You know as well as I that our sovereign lord has ordered this old beast to be put out of its suffering. And yet here you are, defending it with all your will. Why, look at the poor fellow.”

All heads turned to the great cat. The lion was a sorry spectacle. Bare patches of mange on its flanks, a long and ugly scar running along its left side, a gaping wound at the snout. The animal’s eyes were drooped and overly moist, sad smears of phlegm pouched in the lower lids.

“This is an absurdity, Snell,” Wolde continued his protest. “An outrage against Lady Nature herself. You cannot put such a royal animal to death with one of your foul tests.”

“Enough, Wolde,” said Snell. “This is beyond and above you now. I suggest you take your cat-swyving cock back to the menagerie, and leave this task for the true men of the armory.”

Snell chinned a signal. Two of his men stepped forward and pinned Wolde’s arms behind his back, pulling him away from the lion.

“No!” Wolde shouted, his short legs dangling in midair. “You will regret this, Snell!”

The armorer turned away with another gesture to his men. A guard took the guide rope from Wolde’s hands and led the great animal away from its keeper.

“Come along, Marsh,” Snell said, softly now, gesturing for him to follow the lion as Wolde’s shouts of protest faded. “Let us put your ingenuity to the test.”

Stephen followed him blindly, his head growing light and his thoughts distant, as if all this were unfolding in some life he was merely observing rather than living. The lion was tied to an iron stake hammered into the ground, and now stood before the firing wall. This, a high, whitewashed plane of hardwood timbers and boards, had been erected before the Tower’s western rise and was already riddled from previous firings. Stephen’s gaze roamed up and across the pocked and ugly surface, taking in the holes caused by arrows, bolts, and shot. There were a few brownish spatters that looked like dried blood.